


Between Rock Stars and Very Hard Places

by fabfemmeboy



Series: Sincere Baked Goods [14]
Category: Glee
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-20
Updated: 2017-12-19
Packaged: 2019-02-17 07:54:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 48,976
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13072500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fabfemmeboy/pseuds/fabfemmeboy
Summary: When it comes to badasses, Puck's number one - and he's got the neck-roll to prove it. Unfortunately that doesn't solve everything.





	1. Chapter 1

He needed a plan.  
  
Blaine didn't seem to be going anywhere anytime soon, and Kurt was all into him. So if Puck wanted to win - and keep - Kurt away from the hobbit, he was going to need a plan.  
  
He knew he had Kurt exactly where he wanted when it came to sex. He was a total god - a stud. And the thing he'd never realized before about fucking the same person on a regular basis...that it meant you could figure out exactly what drove the person wild...he had that shit down to an art form. He knew exactly what to do to have Kurt practically begging, or how to get him off so quickly the guy seemed like he barely knew what had happened - all dizzy and boneless and wide-eyed.  
  
But he knew that wasn't going to be enough.  
  
It was never enough for people like Kurt. He wasn't Santana, he was more like...well, like Quinn. And even if Quinn hadn't been unwilling to ever have sex again (he probably owed Sam an apology for that one, even if the guy did kind of steal her while he was in juvie) it wouldn't have been enough to keep her happy. She wanted a relationship with romance and all the crap from movies - the way she and Sam were at school, with the hand-holding and dates and shit. He wasn't sure if Kurt actually wanted dates, but he was going to want more than just sex.  
  
After all, if Kurt didn't want more than just fucking, would he be dating Blaine at all? The dude had all the sex appeal of a teddy bear and was probably a freaking virgin, meaning he'd have no idea what to even do when they got in the sack. If Kurt didn't want more than the nasty, it wouldn't even be a contest.  
  
So Puck needed a plan.  
  
He could totally do this shit, be the better man or whatever. Why not? He didn't just know what Kurt liked in bed, he wasn't completely unobservant like Finn would be. And he'd known Kurt a lot longer than Blaine had. So he just needed to come up with the best way to make sure that Kurt knew that he knew. And make Kurt swoon in the process.  
  
The problem was, Kurt wasn't into most of his best stuff. He had game - no fucking question - but all the lines that worked on everyone else weren't gonna do shit here. He was a badass, but Kurt still tended to put that in the category of "guy who usd to kick my as<" so that didn't win him any points. He was a total kickass athlete - star receiver, leading scorer on the basketball team (though it helped that Finn was even less coordinated without pads on), clean-up hitter and not a half-bad third baseman...but Kurt watched sports only when he had to. Yeah, he'd come to the game and seemed to get the point-and-cheer thing, but anything beyond that? Kurt wasn't into any of the video game stuff, or hanging out with a 40-ounce on a Saturday, either. they weren't into many of the same things - Blaine was the one with interests in common.  
  
Kurt and Blaine hung out all the time, so maybe that had to be step one of the plan - crash all that. After all, if the two of them didn't get to just sit around and talk about their inside jokes in French or whatever, it gave him a better chance.  
  
"Hey, dude - they're downstairs," Finn said when he answered the door. It kind of sucked that the two of them didn't hang out anymore, Puck knew. Once Blaine was out of the picture they needed to get back to that now that Finn wasn't being a cockblocking asshole. But right now they were kinda a foursome, and every minute he spent hanging with his boy meant another minute non-jew Fro-dude was muscling in on his man, and he didn't have time for that shit.  
  
"Cool. Thanks."  
  
"So, um." Finn shifted awkwardly. "Do gay dudes ever, um, y'know, like...kiss other gay dudes?" Puck stared at him with a 'what the fuck are you trying to ask?' expression, and Finn continued uncomfortably. "He kind of...I dunno, it's sort of like they're..."  
  
"Don't worry about it," Puck replied shortly. He didn't feel like going into it with Finn, not as uncomfortable as Finn looked with all of it. He opened the basement door and just hoped he wouldn't walk in on the two of them making out again - or worse. Some things he just didn't need to see; imagining them was more than enough. Instead of moans, he heard laughter.  
  
"You just put us in a Lerner and Lowe musical," Blaine groaned playfully.  
  
"The rain," Kurt grinned with a haughty fake British accent and an exaggerated rolled 'r', "in Spain falls mainly on the-"  
  
"Two can play that game," Blaine cut him off. "Nice shirt, Kurt. Did it hurt, when you fell in the dirt? And what's your dad's name again?"  
  
Puck descended the stairs with heavy footsteps. "I know what my name rhymes with," he stated confidently, hoping to join in the fun.  
  
The laughter stopped and Kurt eyed him. "I assume you're not referring to 'Noah'?" he asked in a deadpan.  
  
"Or 'motek," Blaine added with a wicked grin.  
  
"'Motek'?" Kurt laughed - fucking  _laughed_ , the dude never laughed if he wasn't being sarcastic or using that creepy chuckle thing. And here he was not just laughing with Blaine, but laughing  _at_  the fucking Puckster.  
  
"Something his mom calls him - I don't think it's one of the Yiddish ones," Blaine replied with a smirk.  
  
"There are Yiddish ones?" Kurt asked like it was too good to be true, like he was going to have jokes he could make for  _years_  if it were true.  
  
The two guys were sitting upright on the couch, with all their clothing on and not a hair out of place, but somehow as they sat there laughing it was seriously like fucking in front of him. They were mocking him. Nobody  _mocked_  Puckzilla. Nobody used nicknames that someone other than Puckasaurus had created.  
  
He needed to put a stop to this immediately.  
  
The problem was trying to figure out what he had that Blaine didn't. The guy was loaded, he had some giant house over by Dalton somewhere with a tv bigger than Kurt's dad's, he had the ability to kind of make friends with anyone he met and charm the pants off parents...though not in the way Puck was used to...and he got good grades and was all those things that people said they wanted when they wanted a boyfriend. And he was gay, which was important to Kurt - or at least, was important in having anything in common with Kurt, who was  _very_  gay.   
  
This was just freaking ridiculous. He was El Puckerone. He had gotten every woman in town, he wasn't some loser with no game who was gonna fall to a dude who used more hair product than Mr. Schue. He'd gotten Kurt in the first place, right? So how?  
  
He doubted giving Mr. Hummel another heart attack and pity-fucking Kurt to try to cheer him up in the middle of the night in an empty house was gonna do the trick.  
  
But that wasn't the start of the relationship, he realized. That was just doing the nasty - there was always a difference. Everything that came after...Kurt came to visit him in juvie, then he got out and invited Kurt over and they-  
  
...they sang a duet.  
  
That was totally it.  
  
Not just the singing - Blaine sang too, and had more songs in common to sing with Kurt. But he had something Blaine didn't have: A guitar. Three guitars, actually, but one was all he needed. Yeah, Blaine played piano, but the only thing pianists had going for them was a funny name and that was only funny when you were like nine. But guitarists? Chicks fucking dug guys with axes, and he knew how to work that shit - strum a little, smile a little, act charming? Kurt ate that shit up, too. Couldn't keep his clothes on when the Puckster picked up a six-string; he was practically coming in his pants for that.  
  
That was definitely the new plan. Or at least the new step one.  
  
* * * * *  
  
He'd never had a problem getting Kurt to come over, even if he was starting to have problems making sure it was his room Kurt came to and not the guest room next door where Blaine was staying.   
  
 _Cum ovr i wnna sho u sumthin im werkin on_  
  
Kurt's response practically dripped with sarcasm, but Puck could live with that.  
  
 _"Werkin"? Really? You bother to type a vowel and type the wrong one? I'll be there in 15._  
  
In truth, there were a few things he'd been working on. It was just a matter of which one he actually wanted to play for Kurt. He hadn't really learned a song for someone in particular since he was trying to get into Rachel's pants, and she made it pretty easy - not the pants part, just the part where he knew exactly what to sing. On second thought, that wasn't Rachel - that was a vision from God about how to get her in bed. Maybe if Kurt weren't a militant atheist, he'd get visions from God about how to win the boy over, too. Figured.  
  
But he had a couple different things he could play. He'd gone on kind of a massive internet search to find any Jewish guitarists he may not have known of, preferably some with a gay bent. Nothing new. Then he expanded his search to Jewish guys who had done songs he could put on the guitar - he was pretty good at that, it wasn't like he was some lameass who needed a person to just hand him tab before he could figure out what to play, he was better than that. He came up with a few things that way. Then he went with Jewish guys who had written songs done by non-Jews - he found a lot more, but a lot of them weren't things he could easily play. Like how Lenny Kravitz wrote "Justify My Love" for Madonna, which had a kinky-as-fuck video, and Kurt was totally into Madonna...but it had like no melody and he wasn't sure he could come up with a guitar part for a song without a melody that was basically all sexual panting. Not like he wasn't into that, but it wasn't going to help him woo the guy.  
  
So by the end, he had come up with a few options. There was a Billy Joel song that was probably just sappy enough and exactly the right tempo to strum and look charming. There was the song by Simon and Garfunkel, which was cool because that was like their first duet and Kurt would probably like the...symmetry or whatever of it, the symbolism he guessed...but it still wasn't really Kurt's style of music. Maybe if he did the Bangles' version, but his amp sucked so he'd have to play the acoustic which meant he would have to basically announce 'It's the Bangles' version' in order for Kurt to know that. No luck there. The last option was...  
  
Okay, he had no other way of saying it. It was gay. Like really fucking gay. Maybe gayer than the guy in the white cape who played piano with a fucking candelabra on it. No way was he singing it unless absolutely necessary, and so far it wasn't going to prove necessary.  
  
Fifteen minutes gave him enough time to make sure his shirt was clean and there wasn't anything disgusting on his jeans (and maybe check his own ass in the mirror to make sure Kurt would like what he saw. That was kind of the point, right?). He tuned the guitar and set it on the bed, then waited. When he heard the doorbell, he leapt to his feet and scrambled downstairs - if Blaine beat him there, Kurt would be over in the next room laughing at some magazine for the next like four hours and no amount of "No, really, dude, get over here and listen to this" would distract him.  
  
It was like living with Mercedes only not quite as loud. And he was glad Kurt had a best friend and everything, and that he wasn't totally miserable like he had been or anything, but there were times Puck wanted to be able to just fucking see his boyfriend without it being like he had to beg for scraps of attention. Studs did not beg. Let alone now that the best friend was starting to move in on the boyfriend territory.  
  
Which was why he needed to make sure he got to the door first.   
  
He practically dragged Kurt through the doorway as soon as the door was open and looped his arm around Kurt's neck to pull him into a hot kiss. Kurt smiled as he pulled back slowly. "Hello to you, too."  
  
"Hey," Puck grinned. He loosened his grip on Kurt because there was no way to wrestle one's way out of one of those weird side-zip coat things otherwise. "You want anything? Drink or whatever?"  
  
Kurt looked at him suspiciously. "I'm fine, thank you." He'd been coming over here almost every afternoon for the better part of five months now, Puck chose now to treat him like a guest?   
  
Puck shrugged it off and led the way upstairs to his room. Blaine had moved into the guest room next door, but he hadn't bothered to bring the desk back into its usual place yet so there wasn't really anywhere to sit except the bed. Usually Kurt sat on the chair long enough to seem like he wasn't throwing himself into bed - it didn't actually fool either of them, but Kurt got funny about rules and dividing lines sometimes so Puck didn't challenge it. But now without the other chair, it left Kurt nowhere to sit but on the edge of the bed, just past the guitar.   
  
"So did you actually want to play something for me, or did you just want to use that as an excuse so you weren't saying 'Kurt, please get over here because I'm horny'?" he asked with a grin that seemed to say he was okay with either answer.  
  
This was working out perfectly. "I'm working on something for our glee assignment, and I wanted to see what you think. 'Cause you're not in the club anymore so you won't get to see it in person, y'know?"  
  
"I'm seeing it in person here," Kurt pointed out with a raised eyebrow.  
  
"Whatever."  
  
"So what's the word of the week?" Kurt smoothed the bedspread absently. He wasn't going to admit he missed it - lame assignments that almost always were chosen to teach everyone in the room a lesson, a lesson he almost never needed to learn. Show-and-tell time like they were a bunch of overgrown kindergarteners, with Rachel's hand always shooting up first and a speech to go with it to show just how well she understood the assignment. Finn singing something classic rock-ish. Mercedes belting something with soul like she did so well.  
  
It wasn't at all stimulating, mentally or vocally. And no amount of anything could drag him back to deal with Mr. Schue again - not after everything that had happened. Not after Mr. Schue had repeatedly denied that he'd done anything wrong despite ruining his life and then hanging him out to dry. Not when he had Sue looking out for him and he was finally starting to settle into a halfway decent routine at McKinley - not a  _good_  routine, not his ideal world, but a situation in which he wasn't spending every morning counting dust bunnies in the hallway because he was getting slammed into a locker head-first and no one looked up as he clattered to the floor. He was only getting tossed around every once in awhile now, mostly because everyone feared Sue too much...especially now that Karofsky was gone. Azimio and the other second-rate goons weren't ballsy enough to actually step up and lead the torment in Karofsky's absence.   
  
He was okay there now. He was surviving, which was more than he could say for before, and he wasn't about to jeopardize all of that by rejoining glee club.  
  
...but he did miss it. He missed seeing his friends every day after school in a kind of predetermined way they couldn't blow off in favour of other activities or better friends. He missed singing with people in a way that he could never explain adequately to Rachel - Blaine would understand it, he could almost guarantee, but no one else would. He missed the feeling of voices carrying each other that he'd gotten used to in the Warblers. He missed the  _fun_  aspects of singing - Sue Sylvester didn't believe in fun. Fun didn't win championships.  
  
So as much as he didn't have any desire to go back to New Directions, he wasn't entirely disinterested when he asked what the assignment was. He kind of halfway wanted to work through what his own response to the assignment would have been. Almost wanted to see what other people would come up with - certain other people. Quinn, Mercedes, Blaine...  
  
Puck should have known Kurt would ask, but for some reason he hadn't thought that far ahead. It wasn't for an assignment, but he wasn't going to go through and tell Kurt 'I just picked a song to woo you, dude, so sit back and prepare to be assaulted with awesomeness.' There was only so much eye-rolling he could take, and Kurt had that shit down to an art form. So he came up with the first thing he could make up that had anything to do with the song.  
  
"Being yourself."  
  
Kurt rolled his eyes. "Mr. Schue was certainly being original this week, wasn't he? Is anyone ever going to point out to him that he wasn't actually an outcast in high school?"  
  
"I dunno, Finn still whines about how hard it is to be him," Puck pointed out with a smirk, and Kurt nodded with a bemused expression. He uncrossed and recrossed his legs and waited expectantly.  
  
Okay. [Here](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LkA1eSN3DI) went nothing.  
  
 _Don't go changing, to try and please me  
You never let me down before  
Don't imagine you're too familiar  
And I don't see you anymore _  
  
It took Kurt a few measures to recognize the song - he was mostly used to listening his father try to sing it very badly and offkey along with the radio, so hearing Puck sing it was a welcome change. It definitely wasn't the song he would have expected, though he supposed if he had to pick which song he  _would_  have expected he couldn't name any specific title. But something rock-ish, probably, maybe with a general 'fuck you, I'm me and if you don't like it you can get out' attitude. That was kind of quintessential Puck, and if the idea was about being yourself...  
  
No, it seemed to be almost more a tribute to Puck's love of Kurt being himself, which was...different, to say the least, and kind of cute (even though Puck would kill him for saying that).   
  
Really it was just that  _Puck_  was cute. He always was when he sang - he got this shyly-charming grin, like a much softer version of the 'you know I'm a badass' look that was more familiar. A grin that seemed to say 'Everyone may think I'm bad, but really I'm just a guy up here with a guitar who wouldn't actually hurt anyone' - and made you believe it. While Kurt wasn't going to go so far as to say that it was like seeing "the real Puck," if only because he wasn't entirely sure what that would even mean, it was a different side of his boyfriend that came out when he played.  
  
It was a side Kurt liked - a lot. It was...open and trusting and didn't remind him of the guy who had kicked his ass for a couple years. But mostly it looked like Puck was  _happier_ , which Kurt understood was as big a deal for his boyfriend as it was for him. After all, he looked different when he was around Dalton people than he did around people from McKinley - he had known that even before Blaine pointed it out; he wasn't the ice queen with the Warblers, and even if he didn't lose all his defense mechanisms and would never give up his sarcasm, it felt nice to be less...confined. Less restricted. Puck looked like that feeling when he sang, and even if they would never have that conversation - it would be awkward and Kurt wasn't entirely sure what the point would be - he made a mental note to try to make sure that Puck got to play around him as often as possible. Because as great as sex with Puck was (and oh holy mother of fucking god, was it great)...this was almost better.  
  
 _I wouldn't leave you in times of trouble  
We never could have come this far  
I took the good times, I'll take the bad times  
I'll take you just the way you are_  
  
It was totally working.   
  
Kurt had this half-dumb/half-fucking-awesome dreamy look on his face, head kind of tilted to the right as he watched. Like if he was a chick, he'd be about to start making deep professions of love - but since he was a dude, it meant clothes were gonna come off soon. But with love.  
  
Score. This was totally the best plan ever.  
  
That made it sound skeevy. It wasn't - he meant the shit he was singing. Kurt being anyone other than Kurt was just weird, and even if he didn't  _get_  the Gaga costumes or the Madonna or the dancing to that stupid song in the black leotard, even if his eyes were going to permanently roll out of his head if he had to listen to one more lecture about why Alexander McQueen was such a visionary or the difference between Rogers and Hart and Rogers and Hammerstein (Puck still wasn't sure, but he guessed one was more Jewish), he couldn't imagine Kurt not doing any of those things. It wouldn't really be right - it wouldn't really make sense. And the idea of Kurt not doing any of those things because he felt like he couldn't - that would be just fucking wrong, y'know? Because the whole thing he appreciated about the guy, even when the guy was being kind of a freak, was that the guy was a freak with  _pride_ , right? Like he owned it, and that was hot.  
  
 _Don't go trying some new fashion -_  
  
Kurt had to laugh at the look on his face as he sang that, like he couldn't figure out precisely what a 'new' or different fashion would be for him because everything he wore was bizarre by Puck's standards. But it was sweet.  
  
 _Don't change the color of your hair  
You always have my unspoken passion  
Although I might not seem to care_  
  
He wondered if Puck was singing it to sing it, or singing it because he meant it. It could go either way, right? After all, they'd all borne witness to the great "Beth" performance, and there was the time Puck sang Meat Loaf to him, but there were songs that didn't necessarily fit - "Lady is a Tramp" sprang to mind, or for that matter "Sweet Caroline." Even "Sounds of Silence" wasn't really chosen for its lyrics other than the one. So was he actually meaning it, or was he just trying to find something that fit the assignment that was by a fellow Jew?  
  
It was hard to tell just because Puck automatically seemed more sincere when he sang. Not that Kurt was complaining - not at all. Just like he wasn't complaining about the increasingly flirtatious smile or the way he found himself staring at the muscles of Puck's fingers and arm flexing as he changed chords. It just was something to think about, was all.  
  
 _I don't want clever conversation  
I never want to work that hard  
I just want someone that I can talk to  
I want you just the way you are._  
  
There was a line coming up and it was going to be a test - the verse about loving him. He did - that wasn't a question, it hadn't been for at least a couple months probably. If he was being totally honest, it hadn't been a question since the last time he couldn't sing it, when he was trying to win Kurt back with a song. And he sure as fuck knew he loved Kurt when he agreed to let Preppy McGee live with him - why else would he have done it? He just hadn't... _said_  it yet.   
  
In his defense, neither had Kurt. He was pretty sure they were on the same page with that crap, or at least they acted like they were...even if these days he wasn't entirely sure. He knew that was stupid, since he of all people knew you could want to fool around with someone and still be in love with someone else - maybe with two someones, if he was being  _really_  honest, even if he didn't think he needed to be quite that honest with Kurt. So just because Kurt was making out with Blaine like every fucking chance he got didn't mean that he didn't love him.  
  
Or whatever. Not like it mattered that fucking much anyway, right?  
  
He wasn't going to make a big deal of it, just sing the line and see what happened. If it went well, then he'd totally own it. If it didn't - what could he do? It was the lyric, right?  
  
Yeah, Kurt wouldn't buy that, either. But he was sticking to it.  
  
 _I need to know that you will always be  
The same old someone that I knew-_  
  
He wasn't sure when the hell Blaine had shown up, but there he was - leaning against the doorframe and watching. Just watching them like it was some kind of free show. Standing there, arms crossed, with a smile and some designer jeans that were way too tight for any guy but Kurt to get away with wearing. Because seriously, how did that shit not compress important things? Obviously it didn't cause shrinkage - look at Kurt - but still.  
  
And was he seriously sitting here playing and thinking that much about another guy's dick, where that guy  _wasn't_ Kurt? No fucking way.  
  
He tried to focus his attention back on Kurt, but his eyes kept being drawn back to the doorway. He wanted the guy to just the fuck out already - out of the room, out of his house, out of his damn relationship, out of Kurt's head so he wouldn't have to compete for a distant second place with his own boyfriend. Couldn't the douchebag figure out that some times were meant to be not shared with the best friend who kept butting in?  
  
Apparently not.   
  
He stopped playing. "Do you need something?" he asked irritatedly.  
  
Only then did Kurt seem to notice that Blaine had shown up. Great going. "Hey. What's going on?"  
  
"Nothing," Blaine replied casually. "I just heard the music and came to investigate - it sounded really great. I wouldn't have taken you for a Billy Joel fan."  
  
"He's a fellow member of the tribe," Puck replied, eyes narrowed.   
  
Blaine wasn't sure what that had to do with anything, but he was quickly learning not to question these things with Puck who seemed to have his own shorthand for anything that lacked its own ridiculous nickname. "Ah.  _Nice_  guitar," he added sincerely, leaning forward a little to check it out.  
  
Puck felt a little inadvertent rush of pride at that. There were very few things he owned that anyone might ever call 'nice', but his instruments he took care of. His electric guitar wasn't anything special, but his acoustic was pretty fucking nice, and his bass...he still didn't know how his dad's buddy had gotten the cash to get his hands on a Boner P-Bass in decent shape, and he suspected he probably didn't want to know the specifics, but until the cops showed up at his door to take it he wasn't asking any questions. But he didn't want any compliments from the asshole right now - especially not when he was interrupting what could have been an important moment.  
  
The flow was gone now. Even if Blaine left now - which wasn't looking likely as he came a little further inside the room - no way was he gonna get back into the song enough to do the actual declaration shit at the end. He was screwed.  
  
And Kurt seemed to have no idea how much he was being played. Right. Blaine just happened to come in here for this.  
  
...okay, fine, maybe he did. The dude did kind of live right next door. But not the fucking point.  
  
"Thanks," he replied without as much bite and general 'fuck off'-ness as he would have liked.  
  
"I miss mine," he stated, then turned to Kurt. "Next time we're heading out that way, remind me I wanted to stop at home and get it."  
  
Oh shit. Did that mean- "You play?" Puck asked. No fucking way. This was not happening to him.  
  
"Yeah. May I?" he asked, nodding towards the guitar that was still resting on Puck's lap and hand.  
  
"Is there anything you don't play?" Kurt teased.  
  
"Oboe," Blaine replied automatically. Okay, no way was Puck taking that one up - he handed the guitar over and immediately cringed as Blaine began to automatically pluck out the opening of [My Heart Will Go On](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7i_dlata80).   
  
His guitar was never going to recover from this.   
  
When it got a laugh from Kurt - apparently the reaction Blaine was hoping for, judging from his grin - he switched to [Womanizer](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsKadDRTTS0) - like that was hard, Puck thought derisively. He didn't even have to reposition his fucking fingers, just slide them up and down the neck. That so didn't count.  
  
But Kurt didn't know that. And how was he supposed to point out that the whole enamored look Kurt was giving him was totally undeserved because it wasn't like the dude actually  _played_. The guys who knew the opening riff of "Smoke on the Water" - aka every half-drunk guy at a party where someone has a guitar - could play more than that! "I thought you said you played," Puck snorted.  
  
Blaine saw the comment for the challenge it was and began instead to pluck his way through [Fur Elise](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTQ0imT5-aA) at a decently fast clip. Kurt's eyes widened, impressed. "Where did you learn that?"  
  
Blaine gave a sheepish smile. "When I was seven, I told my parents I wanted guitar lessons, I brought them the form, and they just checked the first box which was classical Spanish guitar. I hated every minute of it - so the next time I just checked the form myself and had them sign it, but I did learn some pretty good basics that way I guess." Seeing the skeptical look on Puck's face, he added, "It's all the same anyway."  
  
"What is?"  
  
"Once you can play one thing, you can play pretty much anything else. Music's not that original, it's all in the interpretation. Especially on guitar - it's the same chords over and over. Piano's different, but on guitar..."  
  
Now Puck wasn't just offended on principle, on the fact that the guy had muscled in on his attempts to woo Kurt away from him. No - now he was pissed. Who did this dweeb think he was, talking about the guitar being lame like that? Like it didn't take any skill and was the same shit over and over? Just because he'd gone to some pretentious school where they treated the guitar like a piano and thought finger speed and playing melodies was what the guitar sounded best for... "Bullshit."  
  
Blaine grinned, sensing things were about to get more interested, and cast a quick glance in Kurt's direction before starting to play a melody Puck felt like he should know but it was some classical shit he tried to avoid. "What's that?"  
  
Kurt shot him a dirty look. "Pachelbel's Canon in D, Puck. It's used in almost every wedding ever, it's been in almost every movie."  
  
Puck rolled his eyes. "Sorry."  
  
Blaine switched smoothly from the fingered version to basic chords. "It's also the progression of almost every song," he added. "Okay, not  _every_  song," he amended when he saw Puck's skeptical look. "But enough of them. Like..." Blaine thought a moment, still strumming through the eight chords in sequence, before finally beginning to sing, "When I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me-"  
  
"How had I never noticed that before?" Kurt asked incredulously, staring at Blaine's fingers. Puck rolled his eyes.   
  
"It's not one of the obvious ones. Unlike-" Seamlessly he began to sing what Puck had dubbed 'That stupid fucking song people sing at graduation' - the actual name of which he was pretty sure was The Graduation Song. "Or the one I can't hear anymore without laughing because it's so blatant that I can't believe I didn't hear it before...'It doesn't matter what I say, as long as I sing with inflection,'" he sang with a kind of sheepish look for knowing mid-90s songs by Blues Traveler off the top of his head. Then was "Push" by Matchbox 20, then some crappy song by like Avril Lavigne or someone, then that late 90s pop song that had Blaine singing a line about being cold and chained and naked on the floor...and with every song Kurt's grin got wider, and more impressed, until he had this kind of infatuated look, like he was in awe of Blaine's incredible musical knowledge and talent when by his own admission  _the guy was playing the same eight chords over and over in the same order_  and Puck was seriously to the point of wondering if he'd be better off to break his own guitar and put an end to this because somehow Blaine had managed to not only muscle in on his attempts at non-sexual seduction (whose fucking brilliant idea was that, anyway? Why had he thought that would work?), but had stolen the entire moment for himself to the point where Kurt was now swooning over  _him_  and not over the dude whose guitar it was in the first place.   
  
He had never in his life hated that guitar before, not even when his dad left and his mom kept telling him that the guitar meant he was going to be a horrible human being and cause everyone around him pain - she hadn't meant it, not really, he knew that now, but at the time it had hurt. But even then he'd had a better relationship with the instrument - it was soothing. Expressive in a way that didn't require stupid lame-ass platitudes and fucked-up statements of fake pseudo-mourning. But right now, as the dude with the weird curly hair and overly-wide grin kept strumming - he was playing fucking  _Green Day_  now, and no one who had ever gone to a school that cost more per year than four years at OSU should ever sing the word 'whore' - and his fucking boyfriend kept smiling with more and more admiration, he seriously wanted to smash the thing.  
  
It was his  _one_  shot with Kurt. One. And now the fucker had ruined it - upstaged him. He was back to square one now...and judging from the look on Kurt's face, no one even realized what had happened.   
  
Blaine finished with a triumphant final chord and Kurt clapped a little too quickly, with way too much enthusiasm, eyes shining. "Thanks," Blaine smiled, handing the guitar back into the hands of a stunned Puck. His tone wasn't exactly dismissive, but it was casual enough that it made Puck's hands clench tightly on the neck...of the guitar. He wished he could get away with slamming the punk around a little, but no way would Kurt still date him after that. Of all the times to be stuck without violence, crime, or deception as coping mechanisms, too.   
  
He had to do it.  
  
The lame-ass, too-gay-to-function song. He had to now, the gauntlet had been thrown down - whatever the fuck a gauntlet was - and he had no choice but to go all out. Balls to the wall, right? Whatever he could to get the look on Kurt's face away from Blaine and back onto Puckzilla, where it rightfully belonged.   
  
"There's something else I've been working on," he stated, and when Kurt turned to look at him he added, "She's not a lesbian but I know you gays like her." That earned him a confused look, but he didn't care. He started to [play](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3-GBv_JK0U) and tried desperately not to cringe at the stupid fucking gay lyrics he was going to have to sing.  
  
It was for Kurt, he reminded himself. He had to prove he was bad-ass enough to do the musical equivalent of wearing a miniskirt to school. And while he was a stud, he didn't have the legs to pull that one off well. Plus his dick was too big.   
  
 _Mem'ries,  
Like the corners of my mind._  
  
The song was too high for him and he sounded ridiculous, even if he could get past the fucking pansy-ish lyrics and the fact that he was singing a freaking Barbra Streisand song - he hadn't even done that for Rachel, and that would've been like the surest way to at least get under her bra, Kurt better fucking appreciate this. He tried to commit, to not roll his eyes at his own attempt at a performance, but it wasn't working very well.  
  
 _Misty water-coloured mem'ries  
Of the way we were-_  
  
Kurt was trying so hard not to laugh his eyes were watering - or maybe that was from the way he was digging his fingers into his own thighs. Blaine was sitting on the floor and holding very, very still to keep from cracking up, but as soon as Kurt looked at him they both lost it.  
  
Puck didn't ask why - he knew why. He sounded fucking horrible on the thing and it was a shitty song. And apparently sometimes when a dude wears a miniskirt to second period, he doesn't get commended for being a badass - he just gets laughed at 'cause he's a dude in a miniskirt and it makes him look whoreish.  
  
"I'm sorry," Kurt laughed. "I-...Puck. Really? Why would you hate Barbra that much, to do that to that song?"   
  
He didn't have a response to that, so he kept his face as neutral as he could - settled nicely into its 'whatever, I'm just here 'cause I have to be' expression that teachers had come to expect from him. Blaine looked up, still laughing, and caught his eye...and the laughing stopped as a look of realization seemed to hit - as though Blaine had just realized what the song was and kind of felt bad.  
  
Fuck the pity. Puck didn't need it and he sure as hell didn't want it. He wanted ten minutes alone with his goddamn boyfriend - he wanted prissy-pants hanging out somewhere else, preferably with another guy their age. He didn't want the sympathetic 'Sorry I crashed your party' look Blaine was sending him...even if it did make him feel like Blaine hadn't meant to fuck him over.   
  
That kind of made it worse - made it harder to hate the guy. This was war; there wasn't room to not hate the guy. Only one of them was going to win this thing, and it was sure as fuck going to be Puckasawrus if he had anything to say about it, and the last thing he wanted was Blaine butting in and then looking like he hadn't meant to. That didn't fix a damn thing.  
  
He needed another plan. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This part is porny and therefore probably NSFW unless you work somewhere more liberal than my office.

It was his first free Friday since August, and he was kind of looking forward to it.  
  
With football over until next year, and with basketball being a during-the-week kind of sport, Puck found himself suddenly with a free night that happened to coincide with Kurt's already-lax curfew being even more lax. Score.   
  
Or if Kurt was doing something else - read: with some _one_  else - at least he had the dudes to hang out with. If he knew them like he thought he did, at least a couple of them would probably be equally lost without Beiste yelling at them on a Friday night.   
  
As it turned out, Sam had at date starting at 7, so he needed to get home by 5:30, and Artie's parents were taking him out for some congratulatory end-of-season dinner thing at 5, and Mike had a date with Tina at 6, so everyone kind of hung out at Sam's with his giant fucking video game TV to kill time for awhile. No problem, especially since Kurt had Cheerios until at least 5 every night these days. (Sam confirmed that practice was supposed to let out at 5. Boy was totally whipped, he had Quinn's schedule memorized better than his own.)  
  
He'd totally kicked Sam's ass in Grand Theft Auto, which was a nice change - Sam had gotten the better of him the last couple times and it felt good to be back on top. And in a conversation with the guys about crappy sex lives - apparently he and Artie were the only ones getting any, that was...kinda creepy to know, but also gratifying - he came out of it feeling pretty good. Not only was he gettin' some, he was heading out to get more right about now.   
  
By the time he got home, he was in a pretty good fucking mood if he did say so himself - no giant homework to blow off until Sunday, nowhere he had to be at a certain time, Sarah would be out with friends like all day Saturday so he could do whatever he wanted And by 'whatever' he meant 'Kurt's ass.' One of those staying in bed naked kind of weekends - the best fucking kind.  
  
Then he got through the door.  
  
Blaine was standing next to the kitchen table with Sarah. He wasn't sure what the hell scarf thing was on Sarah's head or where it had come from, but he didn't  _think_  it was Kurt's - maybe it was Blaine's or something. He knew it wasn't his mom's, anyway, it was too...silky. Too plain. There were two of those big pillar candles sitting in the center of the table and a book of matches in Blaine's hand. "Okay, now what?" she asked, fiddling with the ends of the scarf that trailed down her back.  
  
"Now we wait another..." Blaine checked his watch. "...okay, we missed it."   
  
"Are you kidding me?" Sarah asked with a glare.  
  
Blaine chuckled softly. "It's okay. We can still do it."  
  
"Good. Because I didn't put on this stupid thing for no reason."  
  
Blaine smiled fondly and shook his head. "Now we light them."  
  
"And then I get to say my part?" she asked, the annoyance over the scarf seemingly forgotten.   
  
"Yes."  
  
"Can I light them?"  
  
"Not until or unless I get express permission from your mom or Puck on that one," Blaine replied with a firm sense of self-interest at the very least. He struck the match then lit each candle in turn. "Okay, now go. Wait- hands over your eyes first," he instructed.  
  
Sarah dramatically placed her hands over her eyes and slowly tried to remember what her part was. "Baroke...Baroke atah Adonai..."  
  
"Eloheinu," Blaine prompted in a gentle whisper.  
  
Sarah nodded. "Eloheinu melek ha'lam," she mispronounced solemnly. "...Crap."  
  
"What the fuck are you doing?" Puck demanded.  
  
"Shabbat candles," Sarah stated without moving her hands away from her eyes. "How's it go? Blaine said it but then we had to wait forever for the stupid sun to go down, then we missed it but he said we can do it anyway."  
  
"No, really - what the fuck are you doing?" he asked, fixing his glare on Blaine.  
  
"It wasn't my idea - I just asked why you guys didn't do them," Blaine stated. "I thought since- You're always talking about being really proud to be Jewish, and I thought it was a big part of that, so I asked, but then Sarah wanted to know more about-"  
  
"Leave us alone a minute kid," Puck instructed Sarah.  
  
"I can't look until the prayer's done - Blaine said," Sarah stated solemnly.  
  
"Prayer's done - now go," he replied shortly.  
  
Sarah rolled her eyes but moved her hands. "Maybe next week we won't be interrupted," he told Blaine with a glare in Puck's direction as she slipped off the scarf and handed it to Blane all balled up. "And I'll get a different hat 'cause this thing's stupid," she added, heading up to her room.  
  
"I'm sorry, did I step on something?" Blaine asked sincerely. "I wasn't trying to make it a big deal - I just asked because I'd read about-"  
  
"That's totally the same thing as actually being Jewish," Puck replied shortly.  
  
"I thought maybe I'd been missing it and I wanted to know, then Sarah started asking me about it. I wasn't going to refuse to tell her about it. Then she said she wanted to try it, which I'm pretty sure was just because she thought it meant she'd get to play with fire but I figured why not? She said your mom would like it, and I didn't have any reason to believe otherwise. I'm sorry if I offended you somehow with-"  
  
Puck shook his head. Unfuckingreal. Not only was the guy muscling in on Kurt, he was trying to be a better Puckerman than Puck. No way was he cool with that. His mom already liked Finn better, but at least he was kind of used to that. No way did his mom get to like Blaine better, too, even if the dude did pay rent and for groceries and shit over his mom's insistence to the contrary. And now Blaine was scoring points with his kid sister? Of course she liked him better - she liked all her brother's friends better than she liked her brother, and who wouldn't? Kurt didn't have to tell her to clean her room, and Finn wasn't the one who cooked crappy food like five nights a week for her, and Blaine wasn't the guy who had to kick her off the computer to finish her homework. Of course they could be the cool guys, they didn't have to actually  _do_  anything.  
  
Blaine was stealing his 'awesome with Little Puck' points, too. Puck knew that worked for him, that Kurt found it cute or whatever the fuck - he could live with that. Blaine was getting points for being good with an annoying little sister, and he didn't even  _have_  an annoying little sister.   
  
Plus he was being out-Jewed by a fake Jew. A fake Jew  _he_  had created! Not fucking cool, man.  
  
And then the guy got all contrite, all apologetic like he didn't know what he was doing. Bullshit. The dude knew exactly what he was doing, where he was muscling in on Puckerone's territory.   
  
"Just leave me the fuck alone, man, okay?" he asked, shaking his head as he went upstairs. Before he even got to his room, he dug out his phone.  
  
 _gt ur sexxy ass here now_  
  
It was hardly the first text he'd sent like that, so when he didn't get a response it wasn't cause for alarm; surely enough, Kurt arrived maybe twenty minutes later with a bemused look and a raised eyebrow. "You sexted?" he asked dryly from the doorway of Puck's bedroom, and Puck supposed he should just be glad he hadn't gotten waylayed by someone else on the way there.   
  
He hadn't. That had to count for something, right?   
  
Kurt removed his jacket and weird pointy loafer things and moved to stand beside the bed. Puck smirked and pulled Kurt by the arm down onto him. The guy let out a little squeal - okay, maybe more of a squeak if he was being extremely charitable. "What are you doing?"  
  
"Whatcha think?" Puck asked. He threaded his fingers through Kurt's hair as he pulled him in for a hot, kind-of-breathy kiss.  
  
"I think you want something," Kurt smirked, shifting in exactly the right way to cause their clothing-clad groins to rub together.  
  
Puck groaned softly - for all Kurt could act like he was the innocent one between them, he certainly knew what the fuck he was doing. "You don't?" he teased, clearly knowing the answer as he slid one hand down to cup Kurt's ass. That was always money in the bank. Kurt moaned and pressed forward, and Puck smirked. "That's what I thought."  
  
"Usually you only get like this when you've been horny since second period - you didn't even try to drag me into the janitor's closet," Kurt stated, and while to anyone else it would sound like a perfectly even statement, Puck heard just the slightest hint of a pout. "Hanging out with the guys turn into a discussion of porn again?"  
  
He snorted. "No. That shit just gets weird."  
  
"I would think," Kurt replied conversationally as he kissed his way along Puck's rough jaw, pausing to tongue the area just beneath his ear. Puck groaned and his hand tightened on Kurt's ass, pressing him more firmly forward.  
  
Kurt didn't seem to have any objection to this, Puck observed, which was good. On the other hand, he seemed to be leading a little more than Puck would have liked at a time like this. Normally he didn't give a rat's ass about that - Kurt taking charge could be really fucking hot, and the guy had this insane attention to detail that worked out well for him. But this was about something else. This was about what  _he_  could offer, not Kurt, and that meant someone was going to be running the show up in here.  
  
He rolled them so Kurt was beneath him and slowly peeled off Kurt's cardigan, glad that today there was a normal outfit for once. He could actually figure out how to remove all the clothes for once. He did hesitate long enough for Kurt to remove the bowtie (one of the weird clip-behind-the-bow ones) before unfastening the top button and leaning in to suck on Kurt's neck. Kurt moaned, tilting his head to give Puck more access.  
  
His next move was risky - he didn't stop. The guy was kind of a freak about his skin and pale as fuck, but he wanted to kind of...okay, fine,it was juvenile as hell, but he didn't care. The idea of Kurt walking around with a mark on his neck for the next week or so was hot and filled him with a surge of possessive pride. Even if Kurt would kill him later, it was kind of worth it.  
  
Kurt didn't seem to notice anything different, so Puck didn't pause too long to admire his handiwork, just moved up to thrust his tongue almost lazily into Kurt's mouth as he carefully unfastened the other buttons. Kurt hastily untucked the shirttail and let Puck slip the shirt off his shoulders, then sat up to let it drop delicately over the side of the bed. Puck took that opportunity to shuck off his own shirt, flexing just a little for Kurt's benefit. Kurt rolled his eyes a little but didn't seem to mind the show.  
  
He reached down to slowly palm Kurt through his trousers as he resumed the open-mouth kisses. These pants were much thinner than his jeans and a lot less forgiving - he could feel every movement of the guy's dick in there. And they looked like they would be easy to open, too - well, well, well. Kurt could act all put-upon at the sexting, like he objected to the booty-call, but he dressed for the occasion with clothes that were easy to take off. He was learning - Puck had never been so proud. Kurt gently pushed up on Puck's chest,and when Puck backed off he stood and shimmied out of his pants easily. Puck kicked his jeans to the end of the bed, then positioned himself again over Kurt as his hand trailed slowly up and down the guy's chest, torso, and hip.   
  
Kurt kept making these soft moans, like he was starting to go a little crazy, needing more - if the way he kept pushing up against Puckzilla was any indication, he did need more. Exactly what he was going for, Puck thought to himself with a faint smirk as he ground down against Kurt with a quiet grunt. Kurt whimpered and pressed up again, not caring that it made their hipbones kind of awkwardly jut against each other - it was just enough pressure to feel good.  
  
Puck sat back on his knees and reached over to grab the condoms and lube from the nightstand. Idly he traced a lube-covered finger along Kurt's balls, down and behind, before finally circling his hole. Kurt let out a soft, exasperated groan and pressed down, but Puck just smirked. After a brief, teasing preparation, he rolled on the condom.  
  
After four months of fucking practically every day - more than once if schedules allowed or if Puck had anything to say about it - there were very few positions they hadn't at least tried. A few turned out well - Puck still thought watching Kurt ride him was fucking hot, even if he wasn't going to go shout that from the rooftops, but it had made it into some dirty whispering against Kurt's neck, and more than a few times the phrase  _then u gnna ride me? lemme watch u strok n fuck u fast?_  had appeared in sexts; a few were probably not to be repeated, like the attempts at fucking standing up (though, in their defense, they only had 15 minutes before Sectionals were starting and hadn't done more than kiss in literally more than a week). But there was very little left untried without bringing in things like toys or, y'know, other people or something.  
  
Except one thing, apparently.  
  
Puck had found it accidentally when he was looking for straight porn one night - the boxes on some of the free sites are tricky and easy to miss and end up with all dudes by mistake, and unlike most of the stuff on there it kind of immediately made him wonder what Kurt would look like doing that. It was exactly the kind of thing that required someone thin and flexible.   
  
He knelt between Kurt's legs and urged, "Put your legs up." When Kurt looked at him like he'd lost his mind, he clarified, "On my shoulders." Kurt's expression didn't change, and Puck kind of rolled his eyes because seriously, had he ever done anything to make Kurt think he didn't know exactly what the fuck he was doing?  
  
(Aside from that time he couldn't manage to get in, but that was the first time they ever fucked and he'd more than made up for it by now, even if he hadn't lived it down yet.)  
  
Kurt tentatively lifted his legs as Puck instructed - it wasn't comfortable, it felt kind of strange and like there was no way they were going to be able to stay up there once Puck moved. And he was suddenly very acutely aware of his leg hair from this angle. Where the hell had the guy gotten this idea, anyway? Did he even  _want_  to know what straight porn this had come from? Because all he could picture was an episode of Queer as Folk where this happened and he knew for damn sure Puck hadn't been watching that.  
  
"Relax," Puck instructed with a confident grin - not the one that was accompanied by his 'I'm such a badass, you know you want me' neckroll; the one that made Kurt want to say yes to anything Puck was asking, that said 'trust me, I wouldn't let you down babe' (even if Puck hadn't added the 'babe' part or anything, it just kind of fit there Kurt supposed). He leaned in to give Kurt a hot, wet kiss, one hand moving to hold Kurt's hips steady as he slid in easily.  
  
Kurt gasped, back arching, as Puck filled him. The position was...strange. On one hand he felt uncomfortable, his thighs almost pinned to his chest. On the other, something about the way his hips were tilted created this perfect angle where it seriously felt like Puck had grown an extra few inches somehow - the thrust was so long and deep and smooth as Puck shoved his tongue into Kurt's mouth, and suddenly he had the mental image of Puck practically being able to suck his own dick through Kurt's throat.  
  
He almost laughed. Instead a loud moan poured from his lips as Puck finally found the one thing the angle had been missing - more prostate stimulation. "Oh god," he whimpered, and he felt Puck smirking against his mouth. His hands reached to grab at something - anything - and when the sheets proved insufficient, his fingers moved up along the curve of Puck's biceps, past his own scrawny calves, to tangle in the mohawk.   
  
The pace was hard and fast, but in this position the kind of raw burn that could sometimes start with continued vigorous thrusting didn't seem to set in. Maybe it was an angle thing, like the edges of his hole weren't being stretched the way they might otherwise be because Puck had a straighter shot (no pun intended - who could intentionally pun at a time like this?). Maybe it was something he would feel later, but right now he felt too good. Maybe he didn't honestly give a fuck  _why_  it felt so good.  
  
There was just the faintest bit of pressure on his dick in this position and he tried to shift to get more friction - he couldn't reach past his legs and wasn't sure Puck could from here either. As he arched, trying to get his aching cock closer to the relatively soft skin of Puck's stomach, hoping desperately for more contact, he cried out. The warm, kind of euphoric sensation ripped through him- not like an orgasm. Well, kind of like one but not quite - just as good, but different. His fingers tensed in Puck's hair and he gasped as suddenly the thrusting felt like  _way_  too much.  
  
"Wait," he moaned. He didn't want to - it felt good,  _so_  fucking good, but at the same time it was like that moment if you stroked too long through the orgasm - where the amazing must-have-it feeling suddenly turned into something closer to pins and needles.   
  
Puck stopped with a soft grunt and held very, very still - Kurt could see his arms quivering a little with the effort, his breathing ragged, pupils kind of blown. "What? Y'okay?"  
  
"Yeah, just...I...wow," he mumbled incoherently, mentally berating himself for the lack of coherence. He was still hard with the aching and desperate  _need_  to come, but he needed a second.  
  
"Was that a..." Puck started to ask slowly, then grinned. "Neat trick. I thought the dry thing was like an urban legend."  
  
"Apparently not," Kurt mumbled, burying his face in Puck's shoulder. The attention was slightly...mortifying wasn't the right word, but he wasn't sure he could come up with the correct adjective when he was this deliciously dizzy. He drew in a few slow, calming breaths, then nodded. Puck leaned in for a deep kiss that left him feeling even more oxygen-deprived as he began to thrust again - slowly, though, like he wanted to make sure he wasn't breaking anything.  
  
The slow pace didn't last long - Kurt could tell from the way Puck was breathing, the way his hips kind of jerked unevenly...he was close, there was only so slow he could go. He whimpered against the side of Puck's chin in a completely unattractive way, but that was all it took. The thrusts sped up again, and even though he felt like an idiot he couldn't stop moaning - he vaguely cared that the bed was hitting the wall and making a shit-ton of noise, and he sounded much higher-pitched than he would have liked, but there wasn't much he could do about that.  
  
Puck came with a series of raw, primal grunts that Kurt thought should have sounded vaguely disgusting but were the hottest thing he'd ever heard. He withdrew slowly, breathing heavily, and disposed of the condom. Kurt's legs half-flopped onto the bed with a kind of quivery motion, his entire body humming.  
  
Then he saw the kind of devilish grin in Puck's eyes. That look could mean only two things: danger or absolute pleasure. Or torturing him with pleasure - Kurt wasn't sure. His eyes widened as he watched Puck slowly - oh so slowly - resume a kneeling position between his legs and reach out to gently grasp the still-hard cock. Kurt swallowed hard, knowing he was probably going to lose it in approximately two and a half strokes.  
  
Instead Puck leaned down to lick the tip.  
  
A kind of desperate "uh!" got caught in the back of his throat. Puck pumped twice, then leaned in for another longer lick and that was it. Kurt's eyes screwed shut as he came with an almost embarrassingly loud groan, fingers clutching at the sheets where they bunched along the corner of the bed.  
  
As he opened his eyes slowly, he saw Puck wearing exactly two things - a shit-eating grin that seemed to declare "That's right, you know I'm a god"...and a chest-full of come. Kurt let out a shaky, panting breath with a hint of a whimper as Puck flopped onto his back beside him. "Sup?" Puck asked casually, still wearing that damn grin.  
  
If he thought there was any way, any way in the world, that he could get it up again this soon...he was a teenager, but not quite superman.   
  
At the same time, something about it seemed...Kurt wasn't sure. Odd. Off somehow. Like Puck was trying to make a point, even if he couldn't identify why he thought that. Maybe he was just getting paranoid with all of this. Maybe his brain was just ceasing to work properly in its post-sex haze.  
  
He almost wanted to ask what the hell that had been, to ask Puck to promise him it wasn't about proving something or trying to make sure Blaine heard exactly what the two of them going on...but there was no way to ask that without sounding like he hadn't enjoyed it. And oh, had he enjoyed it.  
  
Even if, in retrospect, he did feel a little more like a pawn than he would have liked.  
  
"I have to go." Puck looked crushed for a split second before he recovered, pulling on the 'whatever, dude, not like I want you anyway' look that Kurt knew for a fact was bullshit. "Dinner - it's Friday," he explained quickly. "I'll come back after it's over. Probably just a couple hours, I think Finn has a date anyway and will be trying to cut out early."  
  
"Yeah?" Puck asked noncommittally.  
  
Kurt nodded and stood, pulling on his shirt. "Something about proving to Rachel that he's grown as a person and can handle sitting through a musical without falling asleep."   
  
Puck waited for some reference to wanting to go on a date, for that kind of longing romantic look Kurt could get sometimes, and it didn't come. Maybe the dude didn't actually care that much - maybe it was one of those things only girls wanted. He'd be cool with that - dates were really only for one thing anyway, and he already had that thing. He didn't need to buy the dude dinner to spend time with him, and considering how picky Kurt was about food that wouldn't really work anyway.  
  
If Kurt wanted him to, he would. He wanted to be clear on that one. But as long as Kurt didn't seem to care...  
  
"I'll be back probably around eight-thirty," Kurt promised as he leaned in to give Puck a soft, relatively-chaste kiss.  
  
"Cool," Puck replied, sprawling naked on the bed. He smirked as Kurt looked him over once appreciatively before blushing and leaving.  
  
* * * * *  
  
He wasn't trying to rain on Puck's parade.   
  
No, really - he wasn't. He wasn't trying to step on any toes when he explained Shabbat candles to Sarah. Just like he wasn't trying to screw anyone over when he made friends with people in glee club, or when he and Kurt had DVD musical marathons, or when he played an instrument.  
  
He felt genuinely bad about the guitar thing the previous afternoon. He hadn't realized what it was until Puck started playing the ridiculous Streisand song. He hadn't known what he'd interrupted until then - honestly. Puck wouldn't believe that, Blaine knew, and he wasn't about to go make his case to Kurt, but he hadn't realized it was meant to be a romantic thing when he came in. It was a sweet song, sure, but he was used to plenty of songs not necessarily being sung for the truth of the lyrics; the Warblers almost never sang things because the lyrics fit. How else would he have gotten them to agree to sing a song that started with being pretty without any makeup on?   
  
The song showed off Puck's voice nicely and was a nice guitar part, he had assumed...  
  
He'd been wrong, but he hadn't been malicious. Not like that defense would get him far with Puck right now, but it was the truth.   
  
He kicked himself - why had he decided to try to go showing off? Yes, he wanted to date Kurt, and yes, trying to impress the boy you liked was a perfectly normal way of seeking to accomplish that, but he was still a gentleman. He had been raised better than that.  
  
He hadn't known. By the time he figured it out, the damage was done.  
  
He needed to back off a little, he concluded. Not throw it in Puck's face any more than he had to - especially since Puck's generosity was the only reason he was even still able to go to school with them, and as much as McKinley sucked it was still better than his alternative, particularly since he was in with a couple of the guys who practically ruled the place. If Puck decided to be a real douchebag and turn on him...  
  
He could back off a little. Not stop trying to date Kurt - not until or unless Kurt told him to - but make sure to give the two of them some...alone time.   
  
Which was why he was huddled in his room with his laptop when he heard the first moan from next door.   
  
He almost dropped his computer when he heard it. No way.  
  
He knew the two of them had sex - even if Kurt hadn't made reference to it in conversations before, he had actually walked in on them once, completely accidentally. But thus far he hadn't actually witnessed anything since moving in. He supposed he should have found that strange.  
  
Mostly he just wondered if Puck was trying to prove a point. Send him a message. That sounded ridiculous and paranoid, but for all he knew...  
  
The guy was kind of a punk. He liked to prove he was the biggest badass in a ten-mile radius, it only made sense he would want to send a message to a rival suitor to tell him, essentially, 'you can try but I'll still fuck him better than you ever could.' Not that Blaine necessarily agreed, but still.  
  
The problem was, it was a double-edged sword.  
  
He had always been a very auditorily-aroused person. That made it sound a lot kinkier than it was, but essentially he was just...voice-oriented. In sex as in every other area of his life - he appreciated sounds and the emotion behind them, the different tones, the different qualities...he wasn't the kind of guy who could watch porn without the sound, it just lost a lot somehow - the noises were a big part of what turned him on (if they were decent, which they almost never were, which said a lot about his lack of sex life of late). So the sound of loud, very-turned-on moaning from next door...it was hot. Especially with the kind of proud grunts, in a way that was sort of lecherous but mostly just sexual in an animalistic way.  
  
Then he would remember who was making them.   
  
The good news was, the images worked faster than any cold shower ever could. The bad news was, then he was stuck with the pictures in his mind, video playing over and over as he wondered what exactly Puck was doing to get those sounds practically pouring out of Kurt like that.  
  
Not like he wanted to know. Not like he ever,  _ever_  wanted to picture it. But Kurt sounded amazing - from a completely detached, objective perspective only. As soon as he reminded himself that it was his boyfriend being fucked senseless by the boyfriend's  _other boyfriend_ , who was kind of the resident sex god, it was enough to make his junk practically hightail it out of the country.  
  
He wasn't sure if there was a special kind of hell for people who listened to their boyfriends having sex with someone else...or if maybe he was already in it. He honestly didn't know anymore.  
  
When his highest volume setting and his better pair of headphones failed him - apparently the high pitch of Kurt's moans could just cut right through, especially when accompanied by the bang of a headboard against the wall - he slammed his laptop shut and hurried downstairs as quickly as he could, trying to block out the sound as he raced past the door to Puck's room. At least the kitchen was quiet, he thought as he started washing the dishes. Knowing his luck, Puck would think he was doing this to win some contest, too - he wasn't. He'd even let Puck take the credit with Mrs. Puckerman if he really wanted.  
  
He just needed to be as far away from the bedroom as he could. Times like this he wished he had close enough friends in town who weren't Kurt's friends first Calling Mercedes and asking to hang out because he couldn't listen to Kurt and Puck having loud, point-making sex anymore was just going to be too fucking awkward, but he wasn't sure he really wanted to drive an hour each way to hang out with Wes or David - they were probably out with their respective girlfriends anyway, it  _was_  Friday night-  
  
At the sound of something hitting the wall and a staccato burst of breathless giggling, that settled it. He threw on his coat and hurried out to his car, hoping desperately that someone happened to be looking for something to do tonight. No way could he stay and listen.


	3. Chapter 3

"How much do you love me?"  
  
"I'm sorry?"  
  
Blaine sidled up to Kurt's locker with an excited grin. "Guess what Saturday is."  
  
"Only twenty-nine days until the Academy Awards," he stated, checking his hair in the mirror. He subtly examined his neck, making sure that the combination of his collar and his ascot were still keeping the purple splotch on his neck hidden. He had found the hickey after getting home from Puck's; he supposed he was just glad his father hadn't been the one to see it first.   
  
On non-uniform days, he was okay - his scarf collection was more expansive than the shoe closet of Ms. Imelda Marcos. But he was definitely going to need a better concealer before he put on his Cheerios uniform. It would fall just above the neckline and Sue would paint the rest of him purple if she had to.  
  
Plus Santana would never let him - or anyone else - hear the end of it.  
  
"Singalong Sound of Music in Canton."  
  
His eyes widened. "Saturday?" he repeated to make sure he'd heard correctly. After last fall there was no way he would even attempt it if the event was on a Friday, but if it was Saturday- He was free Saturday. He had nothing at all he needed to do on Saturday. He could certainly make room in his busy schedule for what he commonly referred to as "even gayer Christmas."  
  
"Saturday," Blaine repeated, still grinning. "I assume you want to go."  
  
"Um, have we met? Of course I want to go." He had a thousand costume ideas already swirling in his mind - obviously the costume he'd planned on for the annual show with Mercedes in September was out, and while he mourned the loss of the opportunity to go in his stylized pre-Nazi Rolf outfit (knee-high boots, shorts, great thrifted jacket, newsboy cap) there were still plenty of characters he could channel, even with only five days to come up with something perfect. This was going to be fantastic.  
  
"And I thought we'd get dinner after."  
  
"After? When does it start?" he asked, mentally cataloguing his costume options.  
  
"2 - it's a matinee, but it's in Canton so it's about three hours from here, maybe a little more. I was thinking we could leave in the morning, then when it's done I could take you to this great restaurant back home and we could crash over there for the night."  
  
"That sounds fine," Kurt replied distractedly, pulling out his iPhone to block out the day (and maybe start eBaying a few pieces). "Do you have theme ideas?" he asked at the same time Blaine stated, "It's a date."  
  
Kurt's head jerked up suddenly. "What?"  
  
"It's a date." The second time Blaine said it, his grin faltered a little, seemed a little shyer - like it was a private admission only Kurt was meant to know about, with just a hint of 'please don't laugh at me' second-guessing.  
  
"A date," Kurt repeated slowly. The concept was familiar in theory. He knew Finn and Rachel went on them, Sam and Quinn sometimes...Mike and Tina, though he wasn't sure it counted as a date if one of the parties' mothers went with them. He remembered vaguely talking to Mercedes about dream dates and cute boys taking them out in non-shitty cars, but that had been forever ago - he felt like he'd been an infant then.   
  
He hadn't been on a date. He'd been dating Puck for four months now, he was dating Blaine, but he'd never been on a  _date_  date. An "I'll pick you up and bring you flowers and take you to Breadstix because we live in a town with one restaurant" kind of date. Dinner and a movie kind of date. He was used to "Hey, come hang out" texts that might be followed by eating food and watching movies on a couch, but the idea of going out with someone publicly was kind of exhilarating.  
  
And terrifying.  
  
And confusing. Going to Singalong Sound of Music with Blaine, followed by dinner in Columbus and hanging out at Blaine's house wasn't exactly a typical evening, but it wasn't atypical for them. How was this different than anything else they'd done together? What was special to earn this the 'date' label?  
  
"That's okay, right?" Blaine checked. "With Puck and everything-"  
  
"No, it's fine," Kurt replied quickly. There was no reason he couldn't go on a date with Blaine.  
  
Oh my god. He had a date. A date with a boy, with a  _gentleman_  boy who would probably expect all the proper first date...rituals and etiquette. What did that even  _mean_?  
  
Quinn would know. Maybe. She had a tendency to fall into relationships just as much as he did, and her most proper boyfriend was kind of clueless because he came from the realm of all-boys schools where even seeing a girl was a miracle.   
  
"Yeah?" Blaine's grin was back now, all charming and excited in this way that made Kurt smile shyly. Blaine was that happy to be taking him out? He looked more excited than Kurt had felt over just the prospect of the Sound of Music - that was saying a lot.  
  
"Yeah," Kurt replied, his smile growing at the thought of Blaine showing up at his doorstep, walking hand-in-hand with him, leading him into dinner...  
  
First he would need to figure out what precisely the gender-neutral versions of some of the courtship rituals were, because damned if he was going to be 'the girl' in any of this. Amusingly enough, he didn't think Blaine would expect him to be - Blaine would be just as offended b the idea that he was the only guy in the relationship. But it did make things more complicated when envisioning their dinner date.  
  
"So you wanted to talk about costume themes?" Blaine asked with a combination of indulgence and enthusiasm, like he knew it was important to Kurt and that made it important to him. He knew Blaine would never be as into the more...theatrical aspects of life as he was, but Blaine would happily go along with them - unlike Puck. Puck would never dress up in public for something like this - he wouldn't be caught dead in a public singalong. But this was the kind of thing he and Blaine could enjoy together. The sort of thing they had already enjoyed together, only moreso.   
  
They tended to shy away from public displays of their dating life at school - Kurt because he feared retribution, Blaine because he really didn't want to get Kurt labeled as the gay town bike, and both of them because of a general lack of ease with proclaiming boy-on-boy action in a school of neanderthals. But Kurt couldn't help himself - he leaned in and gave Blaine a quick kiss, nothing too involved; no one around them seemed to even notice.  
  
He was going on a date. With a boy who was open to his suggestions for costuming. It was too good to be true.  
  
* * * * *  
  
That Kurt was excited as he walked down the hall was obvious. For how much the guy tried not to let anyone see how he felt, he had started wearing his heart on his sleeve a lot more since returning to Dalton.  
  
Or maybe Puck just noticed more now than he used to. Maybe to everyone else Kurt looked the same, but he saw subtle shit he didn't before. He wasn't sure.  
  
But the confident stride, the kind of private smirk like Kurt was in on some great joke that the rest of the student body was missing...he was definitely stoked for something.  
  
Puck fell into step beside him. "Someone's in a good mood," he stated as he half-cornered Kurt against a locker. He didn't know whose locker- probably some lame freshman, definitely no one higher on the social ladder than he was. They could wait.   
  
"It's been a good morning," Kurt stated. The tone may have been haughty and mysterious, but the smirk got bigger.  
  
"Good hair day or something?" Puck asked. He didn't know what made a hair day good or bad for Kurt - his favourite look was the totally debauched just-fucked look, so he didn't know by looking whether this was a good or bad day by Kurt's standards...but he knew that was something that mattered to him and could make his mood theoretically better.  
  
"Not exactly. Well - yes, but that's not the reason," Kurt replied. When neither of them said anything immediately, Kurt added, "Blaine's taking me out to singalong Sound of Music on Saturday." He hesitated, seeing the way Puck's jaw tightened and he rolled his eyes. "I'm sorry - you probably don't wantto know, right? I know when you would have things going on with Santana I wanted as little information as humanly possible-"  
  
"S'fine, dude," Puck stated, but it wasn't. It wasn't fucking fine.  
  
How the hell had Blaine beat him to the punch on this? The way Kurt said it - the thing was a date. Even if it seemed like what they did every weekend, this was definitely a date. He felt like an idiot; if he'd known Kurt wanted to do the whole going-out thing, he would have asked. He didn't object to going out, he went out with Brittany and Santana and that hot college chick whose name he couldn't remember. He would've gone out with Rachel if she wanted, too. He objected to the sappy romance shit that went  _with_  dates, not dates themselves. He objected to the flowers and stupid cards - he didn't have any problem with going out. But Kurt was all weird about being a couple in public, so he figured Kurt didn't want anything like that.   
  
Besides - Kurt was a guy, too. He was allowed to ask  _him_  out if he really wanted it that freaking badly.  
  
But no. Kurt sat back and let Blaine ask him, then dangled it in the Puckster's fucking face.  
  
No way in hell was Blaine going to get to be Kurt's first ever date. It had to be Kurt's first date, right? Because he hadn't had any guys to go out  _with_  before Puck, and if the two of them hadn't gone on a date...yes, he concluded, as it stood right now, this would make Blaine Kurt's first ever date.  
  
He was not gonna stand for that shit.  
  
"Whatcha doing Thursday?" he asked, doing his best studly locker-lean.  
  
"Thursday? Cheerios until probably 7, why?"  
  
"Breadstix. You and me."  
  
Kurt knew what this was - he wasn't stupid. Puck saw Blaine getting first dibs and wanted to one-up him. He wanted to make sure he got the first date out of the deal.  
  
Though, the more he thought about it, he couldn't be entirely sure about the purity of Blaine's motives, either. He assumed they were honourable, based on his experience with both parties, Blaine's seemingly genuine enthusiasm about the idea of going out with him, but they did seem to be trying to fight back and forth for his affection lately. The guitar thing the other day, Puck fucking him into oblivion and leaving marks on his skin, like a brand to prove to Blaine-  
  
Prove what precisely, Kurt wasn't sure of. But it was definitely a competition for him - for his affection, his time.  
  
He wanted to condemn the whole thing as juvenile, to tell them both to knock it off because it was beneath both of them and hardly worthy of any of their time and attention. But at the same time...  
  
When Puck had tried to prove their sexual chemistry loudly and at Blaine's expense, he'd felt like a pawn, like Puck was using him to win some contest. But now he felt almost... _powerful_. They weren't trying to fight each other just for sake of beating each other - they were competing  _for him_. They were fighting over  _him_ , wanting  _him_.   
  
He wasn't the kind of guy who was used to that.  
  
It had nothing to do with being gay, either - if he were a girl, he still wouldn't be a person who got a lot of attention from boys. He was awkward with strange proportions that had only gotten stranger over the previous years, with a high-pitched voice that absolutely no one found attractive (even if he was occasionally a musical asset), with a sense of style that absolutely nobody in the state understood, let alone appreciated. He was too smart for his own good and kind of a smartass in a way that didn't endear him to people - he was sad and miserable more often than anyone would generally want to deal with.  
  
Finding one boy - one incredibly hot boy who could get anyone in the school he wanted - who wanted him had seemed miraculous enough. Now he had  _two_. Two guys who wanted him enough that they were going to keep trying to beat the other.  
  
For the first time in his life he felt halfway attractive. He must be, at least, if both of them wanted him that badly...right?  
  
He should have been telling them to knock it off. Instead he kind of wanted to egg it on a little - not in a mean way, not like he was going to be manipulative about it. But he didn't necessarily want the rivalry to stop just yet.  
  
After all. Ten minutes ago, he'd never been asked on a date; now he had two scheduled over the course of three days. Maybe there were advantages to this whole dating thing.


	4. Chapter 4

Puck didn't do nervous.  
  
He was cooler than 99% of the losers in town could ever hope to be, and hotter. He'd had chicks literally throw their panties at him before, and the only way he could be more of a stud was if he had a motorcycle.  
  
So he sure as fuck didn't do nervous.  
  
What the hell was his problem, anyway? He was having dinner with Kurt - they'd been hanging out for like four months now, they ate together whenever Kurt ended up at his place after school. Sure, that didn't happen as often now that he was on Cheerios because practice ran so late, and it never happened on Friday, but it wasn't like he was afraid of Kurt like...staring at him while he ate or reaching over to tell him to use a different fork or whatever.  
  
Breadstix only had one fork anyway, it wasn't some fancy French place.  
  
He wanted to blame Blaine. Say he wouldn't be nervous if it weren't for the fact that this whole night was another test in the epic super-battle for the guy that was rightfully his. On some level, though, he couldn't - for one thing, focusing on the fact that if he fucked this up it had the potential to send his boyfriend into the arms of a curly-haired Jai Rodriguez-wannabe wasn't helping. He needed to stop thinking of it that way; no. He was stepping up 'cause his guy wanted him to. Blaine wasn't the reason - Blaine didn't matter that much.  
  
Maybe if he told himself that enough times it would be true.  
  
Kurt had these things he got obsessive about, right? He latched onto them and they became super important even though most people would think they didn't matter. And tonight was probably going to be one of those things. Because apparently the dude wanted romance - would've been nice if anyone would've told him that before Kurt decided he was basically hopeless and started making out with Jesse Junior over there.  
  
But it meant Kurt was going to be in hyper-mode, where everything had to be all perfect and crap, and that never went well for...anyone, really, but definitely for him. Kurt was gonna have the whole thing planned out in his mind, and while sure - he'd probably be willing to do like 85% of whatever Kurt envisioned, it was never that simple. For one thing, the guy wasn't going to  _tell_  him what that vision included, so he'd be sitting there looking impatient and waiting for Puck to do something in particular, only he had no idea it was part of the plan.  
  
That made the guy sound a lot worse than he meant it, even in his own head, Puck thought as he stared at his closet.  
  
He wasn't a clothes guy. He wore them only because he'd get arrested otherwise. Jeans and a tshirt were a nice simple default...but unlike Finn, he at least had figured out the part where the right fit showed off exactly what he was working with.   
  
Saying Kurt was into clothes was like, the understatement of the century or something. Which meant that, when the guy was picturing this whole date, he definitely pictured what Puck would be wearing first. (Kind of like the first thing Puck pictured was how quickly they would cease to be wearing clothes.) He felt like he was expected to dress up for this shit, but...it was Breadstix. If he wore something other than his letterman jacket and a tshirt, they'd look at him like he was crazy. And there definitely weren't fucking ties at the Stix, he didn't care if Kurt probably expected it since this was a date and everything.  
  
Okay, fine. He remembered now why he didn't do the whole 'let's go on a date' thing. Way too much stress for no good reason - it was worth the price if it meant getting laid when he wouldn't otherwise, which he knew was the point for most dudes, but that had never been the point of his date before and certainly wasn't tonight. They'd been fucking for longer than they'd been hanging out - he didn't need to ply Kurt with dinner to make that happen. What a stupid fucking idea this was.  
  
 _Blaine  would think it's a chance to pull out all the stops._  
  
He didn't know where the voice in the back of his head came from, but he wanted to find it, torture it, toss it in a dumpster, and toss an extra bag of rotten tuna-mac casserole on it.  
  
He was a stud who knew how to maximize his already high awesomeness-meter. He could do this.  
  
* * * * *  
  
The problem with being a gay boy dating a straight guy, Kurt concluded, wasn't that the straight guy's ex-girlfriends were always hanging around with parts and attributes he would never possess. It wasn't about the label issue, since neither he nor Puck put too much stock in who called himself what, and it wasn't even that the straight guy was afraid of being seen in public dating him.   
  
The problem was that one of them was used to conforming to a particular role in the antiquated heteronormative mating rituals and the other...wasn't.   
  
No way was he going to play "the girl." He wasn't a girl - there was no girl. He was gay, they were both guys, that was kind of the point. But he knew that, when there were dates involved, Puck was probably going to insist on playing The Guy. Not because he meant to, necessarily, but because if Puck was trying at all - which Kurt suspected he would be - then he'd be on what he considered his best behaviour. Unfortunately for them both, that was almost certainly going to be the kind of classic chivalrous gesture type of manners. The kind where Puck would think he was supposed to suddenly be a gentleman and hold open doors and chairs and that kind of thing. Where The Guy was supposed to be the one to pick up The Girl.  
  
Why else had Puck tried to say they should take his car? His car was a crapheap, and while Kurt could appreciate that Puck liked his car...they never took "the Puckmobile," even now that his mom was letting him drive it again. The heat in the Lincoln worked much better, it was safer in snow, it had better seats for making out.  
  
On one hand, it was kind of sweet. He understood it was Puck trying to step up and do what he thought Kurt wanted him to do, going on a date and behaving himself, and he appreciated the gesture. At the same time, there was a part of it that made him feel vaguely uncomfortable and like he needed to justify himself and start proclaiming his manhood from the top of the local radio tower.  
  
Clearly he'd been hanging out with Puck for too long.   
  
No, he chastised himself as he tried for the tenth time to get his hair to lay correctly. He was overthinking this. And sucking all potential fun out of the evening before it even began. It was a date.  _He_  had a date. Finn was spending the evening studying for something, and he was going on a date.   
  
So what if Puck wanted to do something uncharacteristic and slightly too straight for them? Puck was taking him on a date. That was the important thing. Whatever else went wrong or right, he was finally - at long, long last - getting to go on an actual, honest-to-god, "I think I'm a teenager now" kind of date.  
  
Proud of himself for only taking an hour to find the right outfit, he hurried upstairs. Right on time - it was a good thing his hair had been so uncooperative or he would have had an extra half hour of sitting around the living room anxiously. "Okay, I'm leaving now," he announced to whoever happened to be in the living room and/or listening.  
  
"For where?" Burt asked.  
  
"Puck and I are going to dinner." He couldn't keep the smile off his face as he said it. It felt so normal, like he was any other teenager going out with his boyfriend. And even if, once they got there, he would probably start to get nervous when he saw just how many of his prior- and potential-tormentors were there  _watching_  the two of them at dinner...that didn't matter yet.  
  
"Okay," Burt said slowly, eyeing him.   
  
Kurt shifted under his father's scrutiny, straightening up just a little more than usual. "Just to Breadstix. I'll be home by curfew. My homework's done already, I have my phone-"  
  
"What's your deal tonight?"  
  
"What do you mean?"  
  
"You're all...happy. Don't get me wrong, kid, I prefer it to you looking like you're about to cry, but you look pretty excited for just going to dinner. This an anniversary or something?"  
  
It occurred to Kurt suddenly that he had no idea what their anniversary was. He could probably figure it out if he went back through the calendar, tried to figure out precisely when in relation to which milestone of his father's recovery their first time was, he knew they could figure it out based on Puck's release date (though he just might hate that connection even more than he hated timing it based on his dad's time in the hospital), but they hadn't ever really...thought about it. At least he hadn't - and he could about guarantee Puck hadn't either.   
  
Was he supposed to? Knowing vaguely it had been about four months-ish was enough for now, right?  
  
"No, nothing like that," he replied. "Just the first time really going out."  
  
Burt's brow furrowed as he considered that. "You've been dating the kid at least since November."  
  
"Since October," Kurt corrected - that much he knew.  
  
"You see him every night, what do you mean you never go o-"  
  
Kurt paled. "See you later, Dad!" he chirped as brightly as he could before he could see the look of realization dawn on his father's face. He didn't need to be there when his dad figured out that "Hanging out with Puck" meant "fooling around in Puck's empty house." For as permissive as his dad was about sex, saying only that he didn't want to  _know_ about what they were doing rather than saying they shouldn't be doing anything...there were some conversations he never needed to have. Or witness. Or think about.  
  
* * * * *  
  
The evening started off awkwardly and went downhill from there.  
  
He was glad to see that Puck hadn't abandoned all semblance of who he was - of who they both were - and done something like bought him flowers. And Kurt was never going to complain about seeing Puck in a tight-ish black shirt, even if the jeans did  _not_  do his boyfriend justice. (Note to self: Somehow convince Puck that a makeover is in his own best interest, if only because the right jeans would make it very difficult to maintain his highly-developed sense of self-control and might lead to more spontaneous public blowjobs.) But there was a kind of hesitance on both their parts when Kurt showed up at the door - like Puck wanted to just pull him inside and start making out with him as usual, but felt like this was a time Kurt was going to demand formality of him.  
  
Formality? How much formality could there be at a restaurant with booth seating?   
  
It was somewhere in the course of the drive to the restaurant that Kurt realized the real problem with the evening:  
  
They didn't talk.  
  
Not like they actively avoided speaking, but they weren't really people who had a lot of things in common. Kurt didn't follow sports, Puck didn't follow fashion, their taste in music and movies was almost polar opposite, and that meant they were pretty much limited to conversations about mocking Finn or maybe - maybe - the garishness of Rachel's clothes. Unless Puck was in one of his "I need to be nice to all Jews" phases again, in which case even Rachel's hideous animal sweaters were off-limits. Now that Kurt wasn't in glee club they had even fewer potential conversation topics.  
  
Normally it didn't bother them. They were comfortable enough with silence now, at least around each other, and Kurt saw nothing at all wrong with just sitting on the couch with Puck, his head on his boyfriend's shoulder, while something mindless played on tv in the background and neither of them bothered to watch. He didn't need to talk all the time around Puck - it was kind of nice, actually. A little bit of a respite from the rest of the day, when he was constantly trying to make sure his comebacks were sharp enough and his wits quick enough.   
  
But at a dinner like this, what else were they going to do the whole time? Stare at each other for an hour while they ate their respective meals? Knowing the two of them - and the general shape of the endless breadsticks - it would degenerate quickly into a flirtatious game of whose tongue could do nastier things to the stale bread, then a lot of eye-fucking, then someone - probably Puck - would drag them into the nearest private place - probably the back of Kurt's car - where someone - almost certainly Kurt - would end up on his knees with a very full mouth.  
  
Not that he objected per se, it just didn't seem very...appropriate for a date. And definitely not appropriate for Lima. In public.   
  
At the very least, they needed enough conversation to hold them over until the meal was finished. Then they could do whatever they wanted to the long, thin, neverending sidedish.   
  
Kurt got to the front door of the restaurant first and held open the door for Puck with a pointed look. Puck wasn't entirely sure what that meant, but apparently Kurt felt strongly about it. Whatever. He quirked an eyebrow and walked in, striding to the hostess podium. "Hi - how many?" She was perky and blonde with a row of perfectly-straight blindingly white teeth.  
  
"Two."   
  
She regarded them curiously, like she was trying to figure out what the two of them could possibly be doing together. They didn't look like friends, they weren't related, maybe- She tried to catch Puck's eye, give him a kind of flirty smile, but he just gave her a skeptical look. "Just two?"  
  
"Yeah." He cocked his head to the side and reached over to slip his hand into Kurt's back pocket (would it kill the guy to wear jeans that weren't so tight for times like this?) and pull him closer.  
  
Her eyes widened and she looked uncomfortable - awkward, like when someone would call Kurt "ma'am" after hearing his voice, then see him and realize their mistake. "Oh.  _Oh_. Right. Right this way." Her smile got wider, even more fake, as she led them to a booth kind of in the back corner. "For...privacy," she offered.  
  
Puck had been coming to Breadstix with girls he wanted to make out with for at least five years now. Never had he gotten a booth where no one could stare at them while he did it. That kind of rocked, even if the chick was kind of spazzy and weird - probably just wanted him. He could get why she would, but he was here with his boy; she could take a number.  
  
He didn't get why Kurt had that tight look on his face, like he was biting his tongue so hard it was about to start bleeding - that look that usually came right before his neck started tilting to one side because he was that tense. "What?" he asked as he shrugged out of his coat and slid into the booth.  
  
"Nothing," Kurt replied shortly. He folded his jacket neatly and set it on the bench as he sat.  
  
It had been less than five minutes and Kurt was pissed at him already? What the fuck, dude? "I didn't even look at her," he protested. Unfuckingreal - if he was gonna get busted for checking out a girl, she should at least be hot and he should at least have been looking. Kurt stared at him like he'd lost his mind. "Well I didn't - you don't wanna believe me, that's your problem," he replied defensively.  
  
"I didn't think you did," Kurt replied slowly, confused.  
  
"Then what the hell?" he asked. "It's been like thirty seconds. Was I supposed to open your car door or something?"  
  
Kurt blinked, thought a moment, then burst out laughing -  _not_  the response Puck was hoping for. "No - no. I'm not upset with you," he promised. "I just forgot that, despite everyone at school being used to us, that doesn't mean the rest of the town is." Judging from Puck's 'what the fuck are you talking about?' look, he hadn't noticed...and Kurt almost didn't want to have to be the one to explain it to him. He was used to it, he'd been getting the looks and subtle push towards invisibility since he was too young to remember anything else; Puck hadn't. Puck didn't worry about things like that - he wore his 'I'm a badass, you know you wanna be me' attitude and people laid off because they were kind of afraid of him. His coming-out had consisted of public makeouts and a couple weeks of slushies.  
  
...and for Puck, Kurt realized slowly, that was probably all he would ever be dealing with unless they were somewhere  _together_.  
  
This was the difference between dating and going on a date, he decided - the public proclamation of it all. As much as he felt the little frisson of excitement at the idea that Puck wanted to be seen out with him, there was still the complication of, well...everyone else and their issues.  
  
He hadn't dealt with it in awhile. At school he got shit for any number of reasons, and now that he was a Cheerio again it wasn't nearly as bad. Now that Karofsky was gone, it was even easier to feel like something other than a complete outsider - a freak. He was part of the in-crowd now, dating someone with even more social clout, and Mercedes was out of her mind if she thought that was a bad thing. It was the only reason McKinley was even halfway bearable this time around. (Well, and Blaine, but even as great as Blaine was he could never be the whole reason - the two outsider-fags getting slammed around wouldn't be much better than things had been before.) And obviously at Dalton no one cared, and his family was fine - now that Finn was cool with everything.  
  
It had just been a few months since someone felt the need to remind him just how socially repulsive he was. He supposed he should be glad they weren't kicked out of the restaurant - that had happened other places. Apparently here they were just going to be midwestern about it all and shove the two of them to the back where the other patrons could eat without seeing them.  
  
"No, seriously, what?" Puck asked again.  
  
He didn't want the date to turn into an hour of ranting, especially since Puck apparently didn't notice the same things he did and probably would think he was being overly sensitive anyway. "Nothing," he said with a pasted-on smile.  
  
Besides. It wasn't like he wasn't used to it, even if he'd been blissfully free of worrying about that crap for awhile. It wasn't going to change as long as he was in Lima, anyway; there was no point in letting it ruin his first date.  
  
Maybe he was looking at it wrong. After all, this did give them a little more privacy for the inevitable portion of the meal that involved trying to eat seductively (in what he guaranteed would end up more spazzy and awkward-looking than anything else). There were advantages, it wasn't all bad.  
  
"You know," Puck ventured as he munched on his first breadstick of the evening. Kurt took a more refined approach - breaking off bits and popping them into his mouth like a pretzel nugget. "I found a place with better sticks, and they come with dipping sauce."  
  
"Really."  
  
"Yeah," he replied proudly. When Kurt didn't really say anything - he guessed there probably wasn't much Kurt  _could_ say to that, really - he added, "It's kinda far, like an hour, but there's some cool shit over there. This old theater that plays crappy 80s movies for a buck, and a place with pretty good ice cream...I dunno. It's not much but it's not bad."  
  
"Where?" Kurt asked curiously. Where was Puck hanging out an hour from Lima? Unlike his new collection of places to hang out in Westerville thanks to six weeks at Dalton, or his newfound appreciation for the myriad of restaurants and shopping in certain parts of Columbus where he and Blaine tended to end up on weekends, Puck didn't really have out-of-town haunts. Except apparently he did.  
  
Puck shifted - he hadn't thought that far ahead. He probably should have figured Kurt would ask where this was, especially since it sounded an awful lot like he was inviting Kurt out on a second date - not that he  _wasn't_ , but he wasn't sure how to explain this one in as few words as possible.  
  
Maybe that was the wrong approach, he thought slowly. After all, they had the next like hour or so to fill with talking, and the whole... _dating_  thing was supposed to be about getting to know the person, right? And even though he knew Kurt - pretty freaking well by now, as well he should considering how much time they spent fooling around and hanging out and whatever. But maybe it was time he tell Kurt this part.  
  
He kind of already knew, Puck realized. He'd at least told him about going like once, with the whole double-coaching debacle, so it wasn't a total shock.  
  
"Over near Carmel," he said, shoving a breadstick in his mouth. "Out by Shelby."  
  
Kurt blinked slowly, taking it in. "You've been going over there a lot then," he concluded. Last he knew, Rachel's mother was "Ms. Corcoran," apparently now she was "Shelby" and Puck had intimate knowledge of what was near her house.  
  
Puck shrugged awkwardly. "I dunno, I guess." He wore an uncharacteristically nervous expression for reasons Kurt couldn't quite deduce. Uncomfortable, Kurt would have understood - Beth was one of those topics of conversation that no one really wanted to bring up, and Kurt tried to respect that it was painful and steer clear of the subject. Kind of like they didn't talk about their respective missing parents. But Puck seemed almost more like he  _wanted_  to talk about going to see Beth but was afraid Kurt would...he didn't even know. Get mad at him? Tell him not to go anymore? He had no idea what the look was for.  
  
...Puck didn't talk about things, Kurt realized. He put everything out there, sort of. But he talked about personal things even less than Kurt did. It was a vulnerability thing.  
  
He wasn't sure what the right words were to say "I think it's good that you're going over there and you don't have to be afraid to tell me about it," but he knew those were a little too...on the nose. He settled instead for something simpler. "How is she?"  
  
He was afraid for a moment that Puck would think he was talking about Shelby and not Beth, but Puck wasn't quite as dense as, say, Finn would be. "She's really good." There was this adorable kind of shy, awed grin that Kurt swore was the most beautiful thing he'd seen. "Big, too - not like fat or anything, just not like a newborn, y'know? I dunno, she looks like Shelby mostly which is kinda creepy."  
  
Kurt smiled - he wasn't a huge kid person, but something about the way Puck looked talking about his daughter was so completely endearing that he might reconsider his adamant statements that children were only good for ruining designer clothes. "You have pictures?"  
  
Puck shook his head and shrugged, then added, "I'll get some on my phone next time I go." This openness thing was...awkward. Felt weird, like he was saying too much - like there was no reason to be telling Kurt, or anyone else for that matter, any of this. But Kurt had this kind of earnest smile on his face, like this was what a person should be talking about on a date or something, so he figured...fuck it, why not?  
  
Kurt pursed his lips and tried to figure out the best way of asking the next question. "So does Quinn...?"  
  
The smile faded. Of course that was what Kurt wanted to ask about - all anyone ever asked about when it came to his kid. Not like she was his anymore, but she still was even if Quinn wanted to forget that most of the time. "She went once," he stated shortly.  
  
Kurt mentally kicked himself as he saw the walls go shooting back up. That wasn't what he'd meant to do. "No, I meant...does she know that you go?"  
  
"I don't need her permission."  
  
Okay, now Puck wasn't listening to what he was actually asking and had in his head how the entire conversation was going to go. That wasn't going to work for either of them. He put his hand on Puck's, hoping that would force the guy to look at him - instead Puck stared at their hands like he couldn't figure out what Kurt was trying to do. "I just meant, how much do I need to make sure I don't say anything around her," he explained in his best gentle - if completely patronizing - voice.   
  
...Oh. Okay, he had read that one wrong. "She knows," he mumbled.  
  
But the conversation had been successfully killed and silence set in.   
  
There were a few awkward moments of idle discussion about who was ordering what - something about carbs that Puck didn't understand, since wasn't that kind of anything at Breadstix? - and a discussion of Rachel's recent animal sweaters that was mostly Kurt chattering away with words like chartreuse and Puck agreeing that they sucked. Otherwise it was a lot of staring at each other's shoulders and chomping away on mediocre breadsticks.  
  
"Hummel."  
  
He sat bolt upright. He knew that voice. He knew that tone - the way his last name managed to sound so much like 'homo.'   
  
Oh god. What the hell was he doing here?  
  
Just because Karofsky had been suspended didn't mean he had left town. Quite the opposite - he was still here, only now he was bored and viciously bitter.  
  
Was a decent evening so much to ask? Was one uninterrupted date such a lofty request that he was demanding too much? Was it so much to want a night out with his boyfriend without having to worry about being assaulted and tossed into the alley behind the restaurant?  
  
His paranoia-meter went up whenever Karofsky was around, he knew that. He knew that the sick feeling in the pit of his stomach was just instinct, that in all likelihood Karofsky  _wasn't_  going to do anything - not here, not in a crowded restaurant with half the town as witnesses. He was being ridiculous, he told himself.   
  
"Karofsky," he replied coolly with the most disinterested expression he could manage.  
  
"Sup, fags?"  
  
"Original," he stated dryly.  
  
"Buttfucking's allowed in public now?"  
  
Puck's affected disinterest gave way to a kind of proud smirk. He glanced at Kurt as if to say 'you in?', then stated, "Why not? Hot's hot."  
  
"It's fucking disgusting."  
  
"Like you'd know," Puck shot back, and Karofsky's glare hardened further. "Yeah, my boy Kurt and I could do it on the table, but I dunno - I'd be afraid you'd like it too much."  
  
Kurt missed Karofsky's less-than-grand exit; he was too busy feeling queasy at the prospect.  
  
"Guy's a douchebag," Puck stated.  
  
"Let's just go," Kurt requested quietly.  
  
"Look, he's gone, it's not a big-"  
  
"Please."  
  
Puck blinked, confused as to what exactly had Kurt so upset - of all the confrontations they'd had with Karofsky in the past two weeks alone, this was the tamest of them. And yeah, the date was going badly before that, but it didn't seem like that was the problem. "Okay," he said finally. Reaching into his pocket, he tossed a couple bucks on the table for their drinks, then let Kurt lead the way out to the parking lot. His stride was a little too purposeful, his head held just a little too high and proud - he was definitely upset, Puck knew that much.   
  
Kurt started the car and pulled out onto the road, heading towards Puck's house. He wasn't sure why he was so tense - nothing had happened. It was- there was a look. There was no violence, no threat of violence, nothing  _real_  at all. Just his imagination running wild after he'd spent an extended vacation away from homophobes of all kinds.  
  
"Hey - you okay?"  
  
"Of course," he replied tightly.  
  
"You're shaking." Glancing at his hands on the wheel, he could see that Puck was right - maybe. A little. But he was fine. "Pull over."  
  
"Puck-"  
  
"Seriously. You're not fine."  
  
He sighed and pulled into the parking lot of the elementary school. Turning off the ignition, he leaned back against the leather seat and stared at the otherwise-empty lot. "Sorry. I don't know why I let him get this reaction. There's no reason he should."  
  
"You're kidding, right?" Puck asked, eyebrows raised. skeptically.   
  
Kurt shook his head in frustration. "It's like he's obsessed with me."  
  
"It's not you he's obsessed with," Puck snorted.  
  
"I know he kissed you, Puck, but you're not the reason he came to the table - You saw the look on his face. Unless his obsession with me is all a ploy to make you jealous."  
  
"It's not. Believe me, I'm not the one he's interested in."  
  
Kurt felt nauseous. The idea of two boys being attracted to him - if not in love with him - had been appealing a few days ago; the addition of a third boy made him want to look as hideously unattractive as he could try to make himself. At least, as long as the third boy was Karofsky.  
  
It wasn't even just about not reciprocating the attraction, though Karofsky was not in the neighbourhood of anything he would  _ever_  consider attractive, it was the whole...creepiness of it all. He seemed like the kind of guy who would decide he owned the boy he was dating, who would get possessive in the worst sense of the word. Karofsky had this way of looking at him that made him feel like his skin was crawling, and that was even before Karofsky had tried to strangle him against the locker.  
  
"I gotta ask - what the hell is it with Finn? He's not that hot, he's kinda dumb, he's sorta douchey. Why is every freaking person who's into dudes at our school into  _him_?"  
  
Now Kurt  _really_  felt nauseous.  
  
"So this is...what? His ploy to get Finn to pay attention to him, messing with his best friend and his brother? He thinks I go home and complain to Finn about the way he treats me?" Nothing could have been further from the truth - if anything, of all the people he tried not to tell, it was Finn. Not only because Finn could be kind of a blockhead sometimes about all this, but also because Finn would feel the obligation to tell their parents and the last person Kurt wanted to know about anything going on at school was his dad. After everything he'd gone through, now that it was starting to settle down enough to be manageable, his dad's health was not worth that risk.  
  
Puck shrugged. "We did kinda get him kicked out of school. Dude's pissed."  
  
"Yes, after he pinned me to a locker with my hands around my throat," Kurt stated indignantly. While he'd been reticent to categorize that as some kind of out-of-the-ordinary violence, after the guys had reacted so strongly...He was safe now because he'd gone to Ms. Sylvester to get Karofsky expelled. It was the only reason he wasn't terrified as he walked down the hall now - he wasn't going to apologize for that. Not now, not ever. Why should he have to?  
  
Yes, the guy freaked out over everyone knowing he was gay - that didn't matter. It wasn't an excuse. Even if being outed had to be terrifying-  
  
The realization dawned on him slowly, starting as a quiet question lurking in the back of his mind: "Who could have known?"  
  
The pool of people who knew about Karofsky was fairly limited. It couldn't be any of the guys on the team except maybe -  _maybe_  - Azimio, but even then Kurt suspected that the guy was too self-interested to be particularly stealthy in his outing. Which meant that, unless Blaine had said something (which he wouldn't because he viewed coming out as the most sacred of sacred rituals that no one messed with), if  _he_  hadn't something (which he hadn't, not even to Mercedes), then that left-  
  
"It was you, wasn't it?" he asked quietly.  
  
"Huh?"  
  
"You're the one who outed him. You told Jacob ben Israel that Karofsky's gay."  
  
"So?"  
  
At Puck's nonchalant admission, Kurt turned to face him. "Are you out of your mind?"  
  
"What?"  
  
"You told Jacob ben Israel that Karofsky's gay."  
  
"Yeah, dude, so what?" When Kurt just stared at him with this stupid disbelieving expression, Puck continued. "Dude was being a total creeper and messing with you. Freaking grabbing people and kissing them in an empty locker room - like he was trying to stay away from witnesses or something," he added, as if that particular twist on the events changed what was acceptable under the circumstances. "Then he has the nerve to tell me it's not even fucking me he wants, so he was doing all that shit for no freaking reason? Asswipe had it coming."  
  
"You can't do that."  
  
"What?"  
  
"First of all, you don't go around outing people - you have no idea what circumstances are. Do you know how many people get kicked out of their houses for things like that? Second, even if you don't care about Karofsky's wellbeing, which I don't necessarily, you didn't go to Jacob because you thought it was something good. You went to him because you knew that our homophobic classmates would have a freaking  _field day_. Breaking news: star athlete into dudes, oh no!"  
  
"He's not  _that_  good an athlete," Puck retorted.  
  
"You played into the same thing that has kept me covered in slushies for years, you know that? You used homophobia to your advantage - how could you do that?" Before he could give Puck a chance to answer, he added, "And third, even if you weren't dating someone gay and even if you don't care about the message that's sending...he's a timebomb. He always has been. He's the kind of guy that if you push the wrong button he explodes, and you thought it was a good idea to push someone who was already scared and vulnerable-" he barely managed to refrain from rolling his eyes at Karofsky's sob story, only because he was busy being pissed at Puck's actions instead "-by revealing his deepest secret to the school gossip-monger? You didn't think that would put  _all_  of us in greater danger than you were in in that locker room? He went from shoving me into lockers, to threatening to kill me because of what you said. He wanted to strangle me to death because that would prove he wasn't gay - do you- He did that because everyone knew, because you outed him."  
  
Puck didn't know what to say. Not like he regretted showing everyone what a fucking hypocrite Karofsky was, how pathetic he was - and the way he was scared over that shit which was just fucking lame. But if what Kurt was saying about the locker thing was true...  
  
He was used to hurting people - the kids he tossed in dumpsters, the dudes he shoved down the stairs, Artie probably wasn't too fond of the time he tried to wheel him off the roof, and the guy who broke the flagpole ended up with a broken wrist. That was fine by him because the people he had picked on deserved it. It was a social order thing - they were losers, if they didn't have someone to be afraid of it would descend into anarchy up in there. And okay, sure, now he was getting that it probably wasn't fun for the losers and some of them got a lot more shit than others...he saw that now, dating Kurt, and he was kinda sorry for some of what he'd done. Mostly the stuff he did to Kurt, and to Artie who was kinda a cool dude. He didn't think he'd ever be sorry for anything he'd done to Jacob, but he doubted even Kurt could fault him on that one.   
  
But badasses didn't get other people hurt in the process. Kurt was like, collateral damage in all this. An innocent bystander who got caught in the crossfire.  
  
If Kurt had  _actually_  gotten hurt instead of just freaked out?  
  
He felt kinda dizzy at the thought. Kurt getting his ass kicked by douchebags at school was bad enough; Kurt getting his ass kicked by douchebags at school  _because of him_?  
  
They didn't say anything the rest of the way home, mostly because Puck had no idea what the hell to say.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More NSFW stuff.

While not his most inspired costume ever, Kurt supposed, it would suffice - especially considering he'd had a mere five days to put this one together instead of his usual six-month planning period.  
  
His pants were a thrifted brown tweed, which he paired with a diagonal-zip brown hooded vest that he'd modified the hell out of (don't even ask to see what it looked like before - it had been horrible. Luckily he had The Eye) and his white henley. He'd planned on wearing the off-white, which was far less austere and closer to his original vision, but that didn't work with his white Doc ankle boots. The casually-draped blue and white striped scarf was a nod to the dress and apron in the opening number.  
  
 _Anyone_  could throw on a habit and go as one of the nuns - how much imagination did that take? For that matter, anyone could throw on shorts and kneesocks with a shirt and suspenders and call it lederhosen. It took a lot more originality to come up with an  _interesting_  take on the costuming options that had been around for literally more than a half-century.   
  
And if someone wanted him to be more literal, the hideous bonnet he'd begged for when he was six was in the car.   
  
When Kurt arrived at the house, he found the door unlocked. "Hello?" he called quietly as he entered. Usually that didn't go well for him, going in unannounced - usually it meant finding Puck doing things he didn't want to think about with people he didn't want to picture naked. Instead he found Puck sprawled on the living room couch in an undershirt and basketball shorts with a video game controller in his hand.  
  
"He's still getting ready," Puck called. He sounded almost...listless. Kurt somehow had expected something more irritated.   
  
"Okay." He moved to sit on the edge of the couch and saw Puck looking him up and down skeptically. "It's a reinterpretation of Maria."  
  
"Here's what I don't get about that movie-"  
  
"Everything?" Kurt joked.   
  
Puck shot him a dirty look. "It's like four hours of running from the Nazis, not one Jew. What the fuck?"  
  
"No one who's meant to be gay, either, and we're talking about four hours of running from the Nazis while singing and dancing in shorts and knee socks," Kurt replied with an awkward half-laugh. Puck just quirked an eyebrow and kept playing. "Okay, what's going on?"  
  
"Huh?"  
  
"You weren't this pissed about me going the other day."  
  
"I'm not pissed about you going. What kind of loser do you think I am?" he shot back.  
  
Well then. Kurt crossed his knees more tightly, smoothing his bondage kilt. If Puck was going to play this game, do the passive-aggressive thing he claimed to hate, Kurt wasn't going to play along. He could do the silent treatment better than almost anyone.   
  
"If you're gonna date the guy, just dump me and get it over with already, would you?"  
  
Kurt wasn't sure which he was more surprised by - the question or the kind of defeated frustration in Puck's voice. They were both so uncharacteristic of the self-proclaimed badass that he wasn't quite sure what to say. "What are you talking about?" he managed finally, cursing how defensive he sounded.  
  
"You know the date sucked."  
  
"Yes," Kurt confirmed. "That doesn't mean-"  
  
"Okay then. You want the date thing - obviously, if you're all excited about this shit today. So just end it already and we'll move on."  
  
His poker face was good but not good enough as he tried to figure out where the fuck this was coming from. Because Puck didn't sound serious. He sounded defeated. Annoyed. Defensive. Almost-  
  
...completely insecure.  
  
Oh god, he  _was_ , Kurt realized suddenly. Puck was threatened. He was jealous and  _threatened_  by Kurt going to singalong Sound of Music with a guy who acted gentlemanly and was sweet around him.   
  
His first instinct was to kiss him, to reassure him, to finally break out the words that he was under the impression they didn't need to be saying every five seconds in order to know where they stood.  
  
His second instinct was far less tender.  
  
 _Now_  Puck wasn't okay with the relationship being open? Now, after four months of sleeping with Santana whenever the mood hit him,  _now_  Puck suddenly felt like it wasn't a good idea?  
  
"You made this rule," he stated.  
  
Puck's eyebrows flicked upwards for a moment before settling again in an expression of poorly-faked disinterest. "Whatever."  
  
"No, I'm serious. You made this rule - you were the one who said it was going to be open, and I agreed to it. If you want to change the rules, all you have to do is say the word. But I'm not going to be the one to try to back out on what I agreed to - it's not my rule to change."  
  
"What are you even talking about?"  
  
"You're sulking around like I'm abandoning you by going out with Blaine. Have I said one  _word_  to you in all the time we've been together about any of your women? Have I told you even once to stay away from Santana? I walk in on you in the middle of a threesome and I blame  _myself_  for assuming things would be any different - but now it's a problem and you want to act like I'm the one abandoning you?"  
  
"Just go do your big gay singalong, would you?" The lack of a snappy comeback unnerved Kurt more than the vaguely despondent look Puck seemed to be wearing. He sighed and plucked the controller from Puck's hands. "What the fuck?" he demanded, turning to try to snatch it back. "I'm in the middle of a level."  
  
Kurt may not have been a typical teenage boy, but he had lived with one long enough to know that the first thing he needed to do when stealing the controller away was press pause - he didn't want Puck to make actual threats on his life, which is what would've happened if he'd blown up Finn's game at particular points or levels or worlds or Xanadu or god-only-knows-what. At least Puck was looking at him now, even if it was with a sulky glower. "I'm not breaking up with you. The date was a bust, but I have no objection to trying again - or not trying at a-"  
  
"Hey," Blaine said brightly as he descended the stairs. Puck rolled his eyes and slumped back on the couch, knowing what that meant. The second Blaine walked into a room, he didn't exist - Kurt could complain about Santana all he wanted, but he'd kicked Santana out in favour of Kurt on at least a couple occasions and never vice versa. This was different, and not just because it meant he was getting less ass instead of more.  
  
"Hey - could you give us a minute?" Kurt requested, glancing at Blaine long enough to be polite but not long enough to look over or appreciate the costume. Mostly he was watching Puck, who was apparently even less secure than he thought. Or he'd been more of a jerk than he realized.  
  
"Okay," Blaine said slowly, picking up on the fact that he'd walked into the middle of something. "I'll go wait in the car?" Kurt nodded and held out his keys so Blaine wouldn't have to freeze; as soon as the costumed boy was out the door, he turned back to Puck.  
  
"We can try another date, or we can never date again - it's not the most important thing in the world to me. If this isn't working for you and you want to change the rules, close the relationship? Then say so and we'll have the conversation. But it can't be one-sided - if you're asking me to choose, then you'd have to, too. So think about it, but you know where to find me if you decide."   
  
He wasn't expecting Puck to say something right away, but the stony silence still seemed like an awkward cap to put on the end of his unplanned speech. He stood slowly and returned the controller to Puck's hands. "I'll see you tomorrow," he stated with a kind of casual certainty that came from dating for four months and spending almost every weekend hanging out in varying states of undress.  
  
"Mmhmm," Puck stated with forced disinterest as he resumed blowing up something - zombie worms? Looked like,at least - on the tv. Kurt sighed softly and shook his head, running his hand absently over Puck's mohawk before turning to leave.  
  
* * * * *  
  
It was a perfectly fine afternoon.  
  
Blaine looked dapper in a way that Kurt had found himself almost missing - but not quite as much as he liked the more relaxed version of the boy he saw now. His hair was slicked to the side (which Kurt had definitely  _not_  missed) and he wore a grey and green jacket that Kurt had to wonder where in the world he had gotten it because it was hideous in a completely period-appropriate way and fit Blaine in a way that made him look a lot taller than he actually was. He was the very model of a modern Captain Von Trapp.  
  
They argued for the first half hour of the three-hour drive; they could agree on singing through the soundtrack of Evita "as a warmup" - and because even Kurt didn't think he could do the Sound of Music soundtrack three times in one day - but the negotiations broke down there. Kurt wanted the film soundtrack, Blaine thought Madonna was the most preposterous Evita of all time. Blaine wanted Elaine Page and the Original London Cast, Kurt thought he was being a West End snob because he wanted to point out he'd been to the theater where Evita had premiered. While they both mocked Mandy Patinkin, they supposed that they both had to vote for Patti LuPone, so they settled on the OBC album - on Blaine's iPod, though they both had it, because it was easier for Blaine to navigate his own playlists while Kurt drove.  
  
The caliber of audience-members wasn't quite what Kurt was used to at the Ohio Royale Theatre production, but he couldn't deny the kind of familiar rush of excitement as the lights went down and the first shot of the grassy mountaintops came onto the screen. He could practically close his eyes and still know the movie shot-for-shot he'd seen it so many times, but nothing quite compared to the energy of watching it in the dark with other people who knew it as well as you did.  
  
From the time he had been maybe five, the singalong had been a symbol of a place where it was completely safe for him to be whoever he wanted to be - and not just because his mom let him dress up even though it wasn't Halloween, or because his dad had bought him the bonnet even if he couldn't begin to understand why his son would want such a hat. The first time he'd seen two men hold hands had been at one. And the first time he'd seen a man in heels - a different year, but the same principle. It didn't hurt that he always got plenty of attention for his voice there, even once he'd hit an age where kids at school made fun of him. Not many boys could sound like Julie Andrews, and here that was a good thing.  
  
It was the one place he could think of - except maybe for the places Blaine knew in Columbus or a few restaurants Charlie kept telling him he just had to go to - where no one would shove him to the back of the room so no one would see him with his boyfriend, and not just because they were in the dark so no one would pay that much attention.  
  
If only Blaine seemed even remotely interested.  
  
He was enjoying himself, that much was clear - singing along happily and adding call-backs where he remembered them. Kurt could see his grin in the darkness, a contented look in the flickering light of the screen. But when he moved his hand onto Blaine's on the armrest, fully expecting to spend the foreseeable future holding hands, Blaine glanced at him and moved his hand away with a kind of vaguely courteous smile, like he was trying to let Kurt have the armrest.  
  
Not what he was hoping for.  
  
They sounded great together - that hadn't changed. He could only imagine what the Morning Hymn and Alleluia would sound like with the entire Warblers there, but the two of them did a pretty good job considering Blaine had told him in advance that was one of the songs he tended not to listen to often and therefore was less than skilled. And Blaine definitely seemed impressed with his rendition of I Have Confidence, even if he was disappointed in his own voice's gradual downward shift that kept him from hitting the last note as well as he would have liked. There was a playful nudge of his shoulder the first time Kurt Von Trapp stepped out of line and announced himself, which made Kurt-not-a-Von-Trapp roll his eyes at the joke he'd been getting for years, but it was all very...familiar and friendly instead of the kind of romantic date he'd been hoping for - and frankly, had expected.  
  
Then came the gazebo scene - the first one, with Liesl and Rolf. They had been taking turns mouthing the words to their favourite parts, often taking the same lines (Who knew that Blaine wanted to be Julie Andrews sometimes, too? It was a welcome revelation from Kurt's perspective), but they fell naturally into separate roles as Rolf said he worried about Liesl.  
  
"I'm sixteen - what's such a baby about that?" Kurt mouthed with a bit of a fond smile. He'd been quoting that line for years and always thought sixteen sounded  _ancient_  - it didn't hurt that the actress playing Liesl looked so much older than any teenager he knew in town. Now he certainly didn't feel like as much of an infant as Rolf seemed to be trying to tell Liesl she was.   
  
Blaine shot him a grin as he began the intro of the song.  
  
 _You wait, little girl-_  Kurt managed not to cringe only because it was the original lyric, and "little boy" would take the song from being patronizing to being downright creepy.  
<-On an empty stage  
For fate to turn the light on.  
Your life, little girl  
Is an empty page  
That men will want to write on.</i>  
  
Kurt playfully laid his head on Blaine's shoulder as he echoed the "To write on," though an octave lower than the actress on-screen.  
  
 _You are sixteen, going on seventeen,  
Baby, it's time to think  
Better beware, be canny and careful  
Baby, you're on the brink._  
  
He had always found the song horribly patronizing and kind of obnoxious, especially once he was old enough to start thinking about who he would want to be dating and the likelihood that whoever he was dating was going to probably assume - incorrectly - that he was the girl in the relationship and needed to be looked out for and protected and taken care of. But something about Blaine singing it seemed far less irritating. It seemed less like he was going to be ordering Kurt around and more like he would be...sending inspirational text messages, for example. To name just one option.  
  
 _You are sixteen, going on seventeen,  
Fellows will fall in line,_ Blaine added with a look like he clearly disapproved as Kurt rolled his eyes - one additional fellow who technically was there before Blaine was did not constitute a line of potential suitors who found Kurt attractive.  
  
 _Eager young lads and breways and cads will offer you food and wine  
Totally unprepared are you to face a world of men  
Timid and shy and scare are you of things beyond your kin  
You need someone older and wiser telling you what to do  
I am seventeen, going on eighteen  
I'll take care of you_  
  
When Rolf reached to take Liesl's hand, Blaine did the same; Kurt didn't pull away, even for show, just sent Blaine a sideways look with a smile that could probably have come across as flirtatious even though Kurt wasn't sure how precisely he managed that because he was horrible at trying to flirt.  
  
 _I am sixteen, going on seventeen,  
I know that I'm naive_ he sang with exaggerated wide, innocent eyes and a coy expression.  
  
 _Fellows I meet may tell me I'm sweet  
And willingly, I believe  
I am sixteen, going on seventeen,  
Innocent as a rose-_ Blaine was unable to hold back a snort at that line, and Kurt shot him a dirty look.  
  
 _Bachelor dandies, drinkers of brandies  
What do I know of those?_ Kurt added, looking flirtier by the syllable with just a touch of the Britney 'Oops I did it again' feigned innocence. Blaine grinned, watching him like he couldn't force himself to look away, and Kurt reveled in the feeling.  
  
 _Totally unprepared am I to face a world of men  
Timid and shy and scared am I of things beyond my kin  
I need someone older and wiser telling me what do  
You are seventeen, going on eighteen  
I'll depend on you._  
  
He desperately wished they were watching this somewhere they could get up and dance. Or that he knew where a proper gazebo was located so that they could reenact the scene sometime. He wanted to dance with Blaine - he could almost guarantee the guy would be a good dancer, and not just because he'd seen him perform. With Blaine's background, he was reasonably certain his boyfriend had at least some classic training, especially judging from a picture he'd found on Facebook of a young Blaine in some kind of ridiculous costume that someone had identified as a youth ballroom dance competition. He wanted to dance onto and off of benches hand-in-hand with Blaine, to see if Blaine could spin him like that, to leap from surface to surface with his boyfriend alongside him.   
  
It was lame, he knew - one of those musical fantasy moments he'd been hanging onto since he was a little kid, but it was still such a classic moment, all cute and romantic before the guy turned into a Nazi.   
  
Then the moment was over. Blaine's hand slipped casually out of his and they both laughed at the ridiculous gobsmacked expression on Liesl's face after Rolf kissed her, then the stupid squeal of joy that had the entire audience giggling and imitating it.  
  
And just like that, they were back to being best friends watching a musical together.  
  
* * * * *  
  
The entire day felt exactly like every other day they'd spent together - as friends. As best friends who were both gay and into all the same subjects and cultural touchstones. As buddies who both loved musicals. As- and Kurt couldn't believe he was thinking this without hurling - the gay version of Puck and Finn.  
  
The way they bickered over which Evita was best, the playful teasing over which Von Trapp was his favourite, the camped-up comments about the bow attacking Baroness Schrader's neck during the party scene...it all felt exactly the same as they had before they'd been a couple. If they were a couple now, even - there wasn't really a word Kurt knew of for what they were. But in either event, it felt like the exact same day would have felt if they'd done it while still going to Dalton when they definitely weren't dating.  
  
The lack of hand-holding or public kissing didn't help, though it did occur to Kurt that he didn't actually have any idea if that was something Blaine generally liked doing with his boyfriends or not. Blaine had only dated one guy that Kurt knew of, a guy who turned out to be a total jerk, and it was while he was still going to his old school (like, pre-Dalton, his old school), so for all Kurt knew it was something Blaine stayed away from in general. After all, he knew how hard it had been to get used to kissing Puck where people could see him - especially at school - and he only stopped protesting it because he eventually realized that nothing worse than usual was going to happen as a result. If Blaine had only ever experienced the brutal side of it, it would make sense if he wasn't wild about public displays of affection. They'd only kissed in public maybe three times, once when there was no one around because the gym was completely empty, after all. And maybe it wasn't personal.  
  
But it certainly  _felt_  personal. Or rather...it felt like a lack of personal. Like they were firmly in the 'friends' zone but liked to make out occasionally.   
  
He wasn't sure why definitions suddenly felt so important to him. He'd never pressed Puck on the issue, and that should have been much murkier than this.   
  
It was like the only time they could be romantically coupley was when they were singing. First during the whole Baby It's Cold Outside duet at 54, now Sixteen Going on Seventeen - they got flirty without necessarily trying too hard, in a way that made Kurt want to throw Blaine down on the nearest flat surface. Only then the song ended and it seemed like Blaine stopped feeling the same way.  
  
Was it all a musical act? Some kind of perverse showface-deal where he pretended to like someone when he sang but no other time?  
  
"You're coming to the party Thursday, right?"  
  
Blaine's question shook him from his increasingly-long list of questions. "Hm?"  
  
"David's party - I figured we'd drive out. There's always plenty of room to stay, and since we have the in-service day Friday-"  
  
"What party?" Kurt blinked.  
  
"The Warblers' annual-...did Charlie not tell you?"  
  
"No."  
  
"I knew I should've made them double-check - I love the guy like my much gayer little brother, but he's kind of a flake," Blaine stated with a grin and a shake of his head. "Yes. Every year at the end of midterms and again at the end of finals, the Warblers throw a giant bash. There's a lot of pilfered booze, but David also has the most insanely intense performance-game setup I've ever seen, and until you've watched Ethan and Wes try to 'rock out' on Guitar Hero while people shout out random lyrics to distract them, you haven't lived."  
  
Kurt shifted. He missed them - he missed that world so much he couldn't begin to find words for the ache in the bottom of his chest when he thought about hanging out with the group of guys who'd made him laugh for literally the first time in years. But they weren't his teammates anymore. "I don't know," he replied stiffly, distantly. "I'm not there anymore, I wasn't there for long at all actually. Maybe-"  
  
"Kurt. They specifically requested you go," Blaine assured him gently, placing his hand on Kurt's arm. "Wes asked me if you were coming. David told me to make sure you came. Charlie swore up and down he was going to invite you, he just forgot because he's...well, he's Charlie and he can't help himself. Ethan sent me an almost indecipherable message the jist of which was 'Can't wait to see you and Kurt there.' The guys want to see you."  
  
He drew in a slow, even breath. "Will Lynn-"  
  
"I don't know. David says no, Wes says he'll probably crash things, my guess is that Wes is right but from what I hear, no one's too fond of him right now - losing their two soloists thanks to one guy's accusations and all."  
  
"Maybe," Kurt allowed. Blaine grinned, like he knew he'd get that 'maybe' to a 'yes' by the end of the weekend.  
  
* * * * *  
  
The most obvious advantage to Blaine's house over either Puck's or his own, Kurt concluded, was that bigger rooms with much bigger budgets made for significantly larger flat surfaces to make out on. Even if no teenager needed a queen-sized bed for himself, it made things very nice for when a second person was added.  
  
Or a third.  
  
He wasn't sure where that thought had come from, but he pushed it back as quickly as it came.  
  
Things had started innocently enough. After dinner at this cute kind of hole-in-the-wall Middle Eastern restaurant with easily the fluffiest pita Kurt had ever eaten, which was filled with plenty of conversation about everything and nothing and the horror that would be Barbra in the movie version of Gypsy (though they had to laugh at the ridiculousness and...what had Blaine called it? 'Meta-quality'?...of it all), they had driven the rest of the way to Blaine's house which Kurt was starting to find less intimidating as time went on.   
  
"We have our run of the place, by the way," Blaine stated as he turned his key in the lock and pushed open the door, Kurt following behind carrying his overnight bag.  
  
"Your parents-"  
  
"In Vail on some kind of 'business trip.'" If Blaine were the kind of guy who used air quotes, they would have been there in spades; the tone of voice left no question what he thought the ratio of work-to-hottub time there was.   
  
"Ah," Kurt replied.  
  
"Yeah." He rolled his eyes - he'd even vaguely referenced the possibility of showing up for the weekend, which he thought should have gotten a response of some kind considering they thought he was in California at some off-the-grid boarding school. Instead he got a disinterested brush-off and a vague suggestion he should pick his next school somewhere they would be going more often for trips - like a ski town. Tahoe, apparently, was their choice for his next term. "Mind if I hop in the shower? I forgot how uncomfortable the gel gets," he asked as they got to his room and Kurt set his bag in what had become its usual place - next to the couch-bed where he usually crashed.  
  
"Sure," Kurt replied easily. "It gives me a chance to do my skincare routine." He could imagine the eye-rolling that would get from anyone else, but Blaine just smiled knowingly and disappeared into the adjoining bathroom. As Kurt heard the shower start running, he began to unpack his bag and changed into his lounging-appropriate clothes - though, he noted, he had purposely brought lounging clothes he wouldn't be embarrassed to be seen in. He didn't sleep in silk pajamas like he assumed most people pictured, but he didn't feel the need to show up at Blaine's in ratty sweats and a shirt that was six sizes too large.  
  
Soft black pants and a Wicked National Tour tshirt did the trick nicely, though.  
  
He ran through a slightly-abbreviated version of his nightly regimen, avoiding anything that might leave his skin a little...stickier than he would have liked. And he used the lighter lip balm instead of the heavy repairing one - just in case. Even though it seemed like Blaine wasn't at all interested, if that changed...he didn't want to be caught completely off-guard and be like kissing, well, Brittany.  
  
Though he would like it known that none of his products tasted like rootbeer. Or bubblegum. Or armpits.  
  
The invitation that he join the freshly-showered Blaine on the bed while they watched a movie was the most obvious ruse in the book, but Kurt played along gladly. He honestly wasn't sure what film even started because within the first ten minutes they weren't paying attention anymore.  
  
Blaine was kind of a slow, sweet, and thorough kisser in a way that made Kurt simultaneously want to say "hurry  _up_ already!" and yet never want it to end. The build-up was always a lot slower than anything he was used to...though to be fair, he was used to Puck, for whom foreplay usually consisted of something that would still be considered sex by any good dictionary.  
  
Even so, Kurt thought, this still wasn't entirely different than what they'd been doing on a fairly regular basis for at least a couple weeks now. Making out when they were alone...it didn't entirely dispel his concerns from earlier that they weren't so much 'dating' as 'best friends who made out occasionally.' Like a more PG-rated 'friends with benefits.'   
  
Not that he would be complaining if they moved into less PG-rated territory, but he wasn't counting his chickens just yet.  
  
Blaine pulled back, flushed, and raked his right hand back through his hair. The mousse that Kurt had painstakingly coerced Blaine into using after abandoning the helmet-haired look was strong but not strong enough for that - the hair kind of frizzed and stood up, and Kurt fought the urge to fix it.   
  
That's what he would do as Blaine's friend, right? As the best friend he'd been for the first couple months they'd known each other. He would offer product and help him pick the right pair of jeans to go with a designer tshirt and-  
  
And he needed to either get out of that zone or get out from under Blaine. Because after a perfectly-nice-but-not-at-all-steamy evening that seemed like every other time they'd ever been out...which was hardly a proper first date...he wasn't entirely sure what they were meant to be doing now. What he was meant to be doing.  
  
He liked making out with Blaine. He liked it quite a bit, if he was being perfectly honest, and even though it wasn't anything like making out with Puck it wasn't any less  _fun_. Except for the part where making out with Puck almost never ended with pants on and making out with Blaine always did, but he had a feeling that might change. Maybe. Unless Blaine felt as friends-ish about him as it seemed like he had earlier in the evening.  
  
This had been a horrible idea.  
  
Blaine stared down at him, and Kurt shifted uncomfortably. His expression was hard to read - it often was. Despite the rubber-faced antics, the kind of uber-control Blaine had developed a long time ago as a coping mechanism made him more difficult to decode than the complicated language of Puck's eyebrows; hell, he was harder to figure out than Brittany's constant vacant look or Finn's series of increasingly-perplexed blank expressions. Was Blaine trying to figure out if this was worth the effort? If making out with his best friend was a bad idea? If it he could even summon up the desire to-  
  
Oh god. He hadn't gotten that far in his thoughts before.  
  
Here was the thing about him and Puck - he was the only guy Puck had ever been with. Or made out with, or fucking kissed for that matter. And Puck wasn't exactly picky about his girls, either - he had screwed some skeevy-as-hell women. But Blaine...Blaine was attracted to guys. Or at least, to some guys; Kurt of all people knew that being gay didn't mean wanting every boy he ever saw. What if Blaine didn't-  
  
He wasn't exactly an Adonis. He wasn't tall and muscular and manly-looking, he was...well, he was the boy who got called 'ma'am' in half the stores he went into and 'freak' in the other half. For all he knew, Blaine didn't actually want anything more than making out with him, than being friends who occasionally made use of a couch somewhere. The look Blaine gave him during the assembly aside - how did he know Blaine even wanted him? After all, there were plenty of Cheerios that Puck had given that look to that he hadn't slept with. Maybe.  
  
...Okay, bad example.  
  
"How, um-" Blaine licked his lips and let out a slow, quivering breath. This was new - nervous. Blaine didn't get nervous. Not outwardly, observably nervous, at least. "How open is open?" As Kurt blinked, trying to figure out what the hell that even meant, Blaine added quickly, "I know we're allowed to date, and you made it a point about being allowed to kiss me - which obviously..." he offered a faint smile as if to say 'we've taken full advantage of', "...but how open is open?"  
  
Oh.  
  
 _Oh_.  
  
Okay, maybe Blaine did want more than that.  
  
"Because as much as I enjoy making out with you, there are so many other things I want to do with you - do  _to_  you - if you'll let me," Blaine added in a rush.  
  
He realized dimly that it shouldn't have been a surprise - it wasn't as though neither of them ever got aroused during long makeout sessions, it was just that...well, with Puck, anyone's hardon against anyone else's leg always meant at the very least hands moving below the belt and usually the belt and all other articles of clothing coming off pretty quickly. And Blaine hadn't, so he'd thought-  
  
No, he concluded with a slight roll of his eyes. Blaine was just a gentleman and Puck was...well, was  _Puck_. Blaine did things like ask before he kissed people and put up artificial boundaries on things and was used to a world where people made rules about making rules. Of course it would be different.  
  
"Open," Kurt whispered. "Very... _very_  open."  
  
Blaine's eyes lit up and a shy grin played at his lips. "Yeah?" When Kurt nodded, not sure he trusted his voice - or trusted himself not to fling himself at Blaine if only he could figure out how from this position, Blaine replied with a halfway-lame-sounding "Cool," then hesitated and added, "I mean, if you want-"  
  
Kurt wrapped his left hand around the back of Blaine's neck and pulled him in for a deep kiss. Oh, he wanted. Of course he wanted - he was a teenage boy being offered sex with the cute guy he was dating. What was so hard about that?  
  
 _What about Puck?_  
  
He didn't know where that had come from, why the question seemed to echo in his brain as he was trying to enjoy himself.   
  
"Are there-" Blaine swallowed hard and licked his lips, looking upwards like he knew there was something he was meant to make sure he asked but couldn't remember what. "Boundaries, no-gos, safe words, any-"  
  
"No," Kurt shook his head. If Blaine was going to stop every five seconds to ask permission, this could be a very long night.  
  
"Protection-"  
  
"Absolutely. In the bag." he replied automatically, and Blaine looked relieved that he didn't have to fight over it.  
  
"Which do you like? I'm versatile so either way works for me."  
  
Kurt stared at him, blinking. He'd never had the option put to him that way. He'd never actually had the option at all - Puck had made very clear without ever saying a word that there would never be Kurt's dick - or any other dick, for that matter - up Puckasawrus. The fact that there had been a dick in Puck's mouth was a big enough step. Here Blaine was, offering it like the two options were completely equal for him? Like he didn't mind one way or the other?   
  
He honestly wasn't sure which to do. He'd never tried topping before, hadn't given it too much thought in light of his extensive-yet-slightly-limited sexual experience, and it felt almost like this was something too...like it was awkward enough already, with Blaine looking as nervous as he did, without adding the potential for another massive complication. But at the same time, it was something new anyway, right? Maybe-  
  
And when would he ever get the chance to try it again, if not with Blaine?   
  
That was a horrible way of looking at it, he concluded. Deciding what to do with this amazing guy based on what he wouldn't be able to do with his other boyfriend? What kind of a jerk did that?  
  
The kind of jerk that was sleeping with two guys, apparently, right?   
  
"Kurt?" When he hadn't responded, Blaine had started looking more nervous.   
  
So Kurt decided to start taking control of the questions. "You've done this before, right?" he checked. It occurred to him that he didn't actually know - he knew Blaine had a boyfriend before, but at 15 that can go either way in the sex department. Or so he'd heard, at any rate.   
  
"What?"  
  
"This isn't your first time?"  
  
"No," Blaine assured him, but he still looked...concerned? Anxious? Anxious fit better. "I've done it a couple times - my ex and I, and there was one boy I met at a party once."  
  
"Okay," Kurt said slowly, eyes narrowing. Then why did he look so nervous? If he'd done this before, and if he actually wanted to do it now - which he said he did - then what was the problem?   
  
"Sorry," Blaine added with a self-conscious grin that conveyed none of the easy confidence Kurt suspected he was going for. "I've just...seen Puck, and I don't want you to be disappoin-"  
  
Oh god. Kurt grasped Blaine's face gently between his palms and kissed him softly. How big of an ass was he that this guy, this  _amazing_  guy could feel so-  
  
Blaine smiled faintly, seeming to relax a fraction of a hair. "Okay, fine, I believe you," he allowed with a teasing tone.  
  
He kept being a little...confused was probably the best word. Confused as to why Blaine seemed to nervous. Obviously he was interested, he was certainly reciprocating everything, he was making as clear as he possibly could that he wasn't going to do something like shove Blaine out of bed if he didn't do things like Puck did them, so why-  
  
...He was nervous too, he realized.  
  
As frustrating as his first time had been, as irritated as he felt afterward that nothing about it had been the way that first times were meant to be, in a way it had made things easier. Or maybe it was just the slight buzz that made things easier, but he didn't have the issue of being nervous about being naked for the first time in front of Puck. He had a myriad of other issues he didn't want to ever have to repeat, not the least of which was his very valid concern that Puck was going to have a homophobic freakout midway through - obviously that wasn't a potential problem here. But there was something about the idea of being nude and exposed in front of someone - a very cute someone in particular - that left a person kind of completely vulnerable.  
  
He probably had the advantage here - he had no idea what Blaine's ex looked like. He could only imagine the issues that would bring. Even if he wasn't comparing Blaine's body to Puck's and had no intention of trying to do so - that wasn't why he was attracted to either of them, and it wasn't fair to pit the jock and self-proclaimed muscle stud against the guy who liked to geek out over decidedly-indoor pursuits...he could understand why Blaine might have that second-guessing problem.  
  
He was having second-guessing problems of his own.  
  
He didn't mean to keep making comparisons. Really he didn't.   
  
It was just-...well, okay, he'd made some comparisons between Puck and porn he'd seen before (usually that real life was  _so_  much fucking better than watching it on his computer screen), and he'd compared between different times he and Puck had done certain things - like the fact that Puck seemed to get almost stronger when he was pissed at someone else but sweeter (not that he would ever say it) when he thought someone had hurt 'his boy', or that sometimes the half-frozen tongue thing after Puck drank something cold made him feel like he was on fire and freezing to death all at once...and all that just kind of happened. It seemed normal enough, he reasoned, and certainly wasn't anything that caused a problem.  
  
But suddenly there he was, in bed with a  _different_  boy, and thinking about Puck.  
  
Not like that - not like he was picturing Puck instead of Blaine. Oh god, no. That would be beyond horrible even for him. It was more-  
  
...It was just that they kissed differently. Puck had this confidence when he kissed, like he was a stud and he damn sure knew it, and Blaine got almost shy and sweet like he expected Kurt to shove him away at any moment and was kind of euphorically grateful that he was allowed to keep making out with him. And Puck tended towards squeezing through jeans while Blaine seemed to prefer peeling the jeans down just enough to reach in and rub slowly through the soft, silky fabric of boxer briefs. And Puck kind of kept half-thrusting against his crotch while they made out in the lead-up to actual sex, whereas Blaine seemed like he was consciously holding still to keep himself in check.  
  
It wasn't that one was better than the other, he swore. It was just different than he'd gotten used to and every time the sensations felt new and unusual he had to try to figure out why, and that led to a lot of observations about the differences- not that he should have been surprised, Puck and Blaine were opposites in almost every other way, too, but it felt  _wrong_. It felt wrong to even think the  _name_  "Puck" while in bed with someone else - someone he cared about a lot. Someone he probably loved but hadn't honestly thought that far ahead about yet. Someone who deserved a lot fucking better than to be in bed with someone who was thinking about someone else - not fantasizing, no, but even just comparing...that was wrong, right? That couldn't possibly be the right thing to do.  
  
What the fuck was he doing? How was this even close to fair? To  _anyone_  involved, really? Because if it would make Blaine feel like shit to know what precisely was in his mind right now, it wasn't going to make Puck feel any better - and he would know. He wouldn't have felt any better walking in on Puck and Santana if he thought Puck was fantasizing about him.  
  
He wasn't fantasizing, but that wasn't entirely the point.  
  
Blaine pulled back long enough to shuck off his tshirt, and Kurt found himself staring. They weren't the guns of Puckerone or anything, but Blaine was definitely... _definitely_  attractive. In a completely different way - lean instead of bulk muscle, and without a visible six-pack but slim and fit. And hairier than Kurt expected - Puck wasn't exactly blond or anything but managed to have very little body hair; Blaine had a smattering of dark hair over his chest and a very well-defined trail that led from just below his pecs, down around his navel, getting thicker and darker as it disappeared into the top of his jeans, and suddenly all Kurt could think about was following it. Following it and sucking whatever he found.  
  
And  _tasting_  whatever he found.  
  
Okay, there were definite advantages here.  
  
Blaine got off the bed and drew in a deep breath, almost wincing as if he expected Kurt to laugh at him. Hitching his thumbs under his waistband, he slid his track pants and underwear off in a smooth motion and stepped out of them, then waited.  
  
He was average in a kind of perfect way, Kurt decided as he naturally did a once-over glance. If any part were different, the total effect wouldn't be quite as  _right_. Blaine's cock was a little darker than he expected, but he was fascinated by the full veins - he could almost imagine being able to feel them pulsing against his tongue, a concept that almost made him moan from the thought alone. And though he'd never felt a particular need to teabag before, the ample balls had him intrigued.  
  
When Blaine finally lifted his gaze enough to meet Kurt's eyes and saw a look that was decidedly turned-on, he offered in a quiet voice, "Now you." The added, needy "Please," that fell from his lips upped Kurt's nervousness as the now-naked Blaine knelt on the bed, waiting as patiently as a horny 17-year-old couple possibly be expected to be.  
  
He unbuttoned his own shirt with a smoothness that was well-practiced (since any time he got too fumbly with his fingers and Puck got impatience, there was a chance the guy would do something really stupid like rip a vintage Dior Homme) and slipped it slowly off his shoulders, still hoping in the back of his mind that Blaine wasn't going to do something like laugh at him or run away screaming. He had no muscle tone to speak of, the hint of pudge still lurking along the sides of his waist, and hands and wrists that somehow managed to look clumsier when he was unclothed.   
  
Blaine didn't run - not by any stretch of the imagination. He attacked.  
  
Kurt gasped as he felt Blaine's warm, hot mouth close over his left nipple, sucking, tongue swirling. His head fell back against the pillow, which arched his chest up - more pressure, god it felt good. The moaning Blaine was doing only made it better, too, sending soft vibrations through his chest and straight to his dick. It reminded him of something Puck had told him once, when he was concerned about seeming too lewd with all the moaning he did while giving a blowjob...that the moaning felt so good and was such a turnon that if he ever stopped Puck would have to kick his ass. Not literally, of course, more like a non-serious threat made when totally horny.  
  
Now he understood it. Because if it felt this good now, he could only imagine what it would feel like if someone did this to his cock.  
  
Blaine's mouth lifted suddenly from his chest, and Kurt whimpered unwillingly at the loss of contact, of heat. Fingers moved up to roll slowly across the nipple, back and forth, then pinching gently, then Kurt felt a soft, shaky huff of an exhale against his lower abdomen. His eyes opened and he saw Blaine staring longingly at the exposed V of Kurt's underwear, flanked by the top of his unzipped jeans that would have been much,  _much_  too tight by now. He looked like he was considering something, like he was afraid Kurt would tell him not to do what it was he wanted, and - without meeting Kurt's eyes - he practically dove towards the still-covered cock, mouthing it hotly through the black silky fabric. He was half-hard before, but now his underwear was beginning to tent in a way that bordered on obscene as Blaine tongued and halfway-sucked without ever touching skin. "What- oh god," Kurt moaned, watching the bob of curls between his legs.  
  
Blaine's head jerked up. "Sorry."  
  
Kurt blinked. "Sorry?" he repeated.  
  
"I...couldn't help myself. I have kind of an oral fixation," he added with a halfway-sheepish grin and a kind of glint in his eye that made Kurt suddenly want to know exactly what else Blaine could fixate on because he had a hunch it felt amazing.   
  
"Don't ever apologize for that," Kurt groaned. "I had no idea that could feel so... _hot_."  
  
Blaine smirked in a way that was definitely more Puck-like than not, and the guilt was back. "Just wait." He leaned in again, mouthing the bulge and kind of nudging it like he was almost testing himself, idly curious whether he could get the thing out from under the fabric without ever using his hands, and if Kurt weren't so hard already he thought that might sound like a great way to spend an afternoon. His hands worked up slowly along the outside of Kurt's thighs, across the waistband, and Kurt lifted his hips carefully to help Blaine slide the clothes down.  
  
He heard a heavy intake of breath, then silence - silence and stillness were never a good sign when it came to sex, it signaled a problem in a way that made Kurt imagine a comical whammy-like robot-creature running through the room flailing his springy arms and warning some guy named Will Robinson of danger (note to self: stop hanging out with Artie during "old school sci-fi weekend").  
  
Blaine was staring at him - kind of looking him up and down but mostly just staring at his crotch, and suddenly Kurt wanted nothing more than to cover himself and never speak of any of this again.  
  
" _Oh._ "  
  
He cringed, blushed- then saw the look on Blaine's face. The only thing he could equate it to was the first time he had seen a picture of full-frontal male nudity when he was eleven - a guy in a helmet, weird black streaks under his eyes, pads on his shoulders, and absolutely nothing else, courtesy of some magazine he couldn't possibly identify, but he remembered feeling like that image alone could fill all potential masturbatory fantasies for the rest of his life (and for awhile it had).  
  
Blaine was staring at him like he was that hot guy. Like he would be getting off every night for the foreseeable future thinking about his dick - him, Kurt Hummel, the guy about whom there had been several bets regarding whether or not he even had testicles.  
  
"May I?" Blaine asked, his hand inching towards the painfully-hard erection.  
  
"Uh- Uh-huh," he wheezed, still in confused awe of that Look.  
  
Blaine grinned and licked his own hand - Kurt tried not to think about what else that tongue might be capable of - and began to slowly stroke Kurt's dick with long, smooth movements. He moved up to kiss Kurt, the awkward angle causing Blaine to almost curve against his side in a way that left his erection jutting insistently into his hip.  
  
"I really hope you're at least a little versatile," Blaine mumbled against his lips. "Because god would it be a shame to let that go to waste." Kurt's mouth fell open as he tried to draw in a breath through his panting, and Blaine took the opportunity for his teeth to tease Kurt's bottom lip. "There is  _so_  much I want to do to you..."  
  
He wasn't about to complain at that prospect.   
  
There was still something about it that felt so...wrong, though. So unfair. So... _cheating_.   
  
"Roll over," Blaine urged, all hot and whispery and breathy and like he was in this incredible fantasy he couldn't believe was coming true, and Kurt...wasn't. Not because he didn't want to be - oh, did he ever - and not because Blaine wasn't doing it for him - because oh hell yes he was - but because he felt bad doing this to Puck.  
  
He allowed Blaine to nudge his hips over as he rolled onto his stomach, adjusting a little to make sure his erection wasn't trapped in some unbearably painful position. It kind of surprised him, he thought idly; Blaine seemed much more the passionate-makeout-during-sex type than the rough-and-from-behind kind of guy. Maybe it was part of the hidden thing, being all button-up like he usually was.  
  
Was he seriously sitting here analyzing methodically his expectations and assumptions about what Blaine might do in bed instead of paying attention and enjoying the things Blaine was actually  _doing_? God, what was  _wrong_  with him?  
  
This needed to stop. Either he needed to let himself enjoy this as much as he wanted to, or he needed to put an end to this because it wasn't fair to either one of them.   
  
So the question needed to be answered in two parts, he decided as Blaine's hands moved slowly but surely down his back - like Blaine was trying to make a mental contour map of every part of him, even the pieces he thought were either scrawny or vaguely love-handle-ish. First, did he want to keep doing this? The instinctive gut-check said yes, the groin-check said oh hell fucking yes. Meaning any issue had to be a mental block.  
  
He was seriously having issues because of Puck and guilt. Really? That was the best he could come up with? As if Puck had ever been faithful to him. As if Puck had felt any guilt whatsoever when fucking Santana - and Brittany, at the same time.   
  
That mental image sent his cock flagging a little. Luckily in that position it would be hard to tell.  
  
Blaine was kissing his way down Kurt's spine now in a way that didn't so much feel good per se, but was filling him with this kind of nervous anticipation. Really it was up to one question now - did he want to tell Puck to get the hell out of his head so he could find out what was going to happen next? Or did he want to tell Blaine thank you but no thank you because he was busy being an idiot over a boy who had certainly never pined this much over him?  
  
When put like that, the answer was pretty clear.  
  
The exhale of warm breath on the curve of his ass, along with a gentle but firm cupping of each cheek, was the only warning he got before the most stunningly good sensation of his life took him by surprise. He wasn't sure what the hell Blaine thought he was doing or why in the world he thought his mouth should be  _there_ , but it sent his nerves spinning. "Blaine," he gasped, his voice quivering a little as he tried to speak somewhat coherently. "Y-you don't have to-"  
  
"I want to." The earnestness in Blaine's voice was almost palpable. In a way, Kurt could almost understand that - it sounded like the feeling when he absolutely craved a cock in his mouth, in that way that made him feel like either a whore or a porn star but had never earned him any complaints.   
  
"Are you sure, it's not the most-"  
  
"I like it. ...Unless you don't," Blaine added, like it occurred to him suddenly that maybe Kurt wasn't into any kind of anal stimulation.  
  
"I do," he replied with a fervor that surprised even him.  
  
"Then relax." Blaine's voice sounded strange, like it managed to be both smiling and husky with deep sexual need at the same time, and Kurt wasn't sure how he managed that. But then the wet sensation was against his hole again and he couldn't really wonder much else.  
  
 _Relax._  It seemed like good advice all-around, really. Relax and enjoy. He had every right to do both.  
  
The feeling of Blaine's hands spreading his asscheeks would have been enough to get his attention, to get him moaning, but the feeling of the flat of Blaine's tongue lapping over the sensitive skin was enough to make him sound like he was something out of a bad porn. He was certainly used to things there - fingers, obviously, and Puck's dick, and a dildo on a few occasions before that, but there was something so much hotter - literally - about this. He'd assumed it was the kind of thing that only worked in theory but would be completely awkward and disgusting in reality; apparently not. Not if the way Blaine was going to town was any indication.  
  
He felt the tip of Blaine's tongue press against the pucker, like Blaine was literally going to try to fuck him  _with his tongue_ , and he rocked back at the imagery alone. The feeling of the wriggling that managed to get just barely inside, combined with the skim of the soft duvet against his aching cock was almost too much - he reached up and pulled a pillow under his head, clutching it tightly as he tried not to start humping the bed. Blaine was moaning against his ass with an enthusiasm that Kurt would swear was fake if he couldn't feel Blaine's erection rubbing against his own leg, down near the ankle because that's where it ended up when the guy decided to lay face-first against-  
  
Blaine awkwardly thrust two fingers blindly in the direction of Kurt's face, and when he figured out why they were there he jerked downwards against the bed in what would have been a completely embarrassing motion if he could think of anything except Blaine's tongue flicking against his ass and how desperately,  _desperately_  he needed something filling him. He carefully grasped Blaine's wrist and leaned in to sloppily swirl his tongue around the offered fingers, moaning and sucking the way he badly wanted to do to Blaine's dick right about now.   
  
Blaine whimpered as he realized precisely what Kurt was imagining - or at least trying to convey - and his cock twitched heavily. Slowly he withdrew the fingers from Kurt's mouth and sat up, wiping his mouth sloppily with the back of his hand. "Move up a little," he instructed in a husky voice that Kurt wanted to obey pretty much regardless of what instructions it might be giving. With a little guidance from Blaine's hands, he raised up to his knees but kept his head buried against the pillow. Blaine knelt behind him and again leaned in to swipe his tongue against Kurt's ass, then pressed one finger in carefully. He gasped at the sensation, his cock leaking .  
  
He wasn't sure whether Blaine spent a lot of time exploring or a lot of time imagining, but it was definitely one or the other because the boy did things with his finger Kurt had never even  _considered_. Let alone when he added the second one-  
  
Apparently dating someone gay, who was into gay things in all senses of the word, might have distinct advantages.   
  
Blaine's mouth moved away and Kurt cried out in indignant whimpered protest against the pillow. "Don't- Oh  _please_ god don't stop," he moaned. The combination of the fingers that Blaine knew just how to use, the warmth of his mouth, the earnest vibrations of Blaine literally moaning against his ass - it left his mind numb and his entire body fuzzy, as if he were just to one side of something that would blow his freaking mind but Blaine wouldn't quite let him get there. He wasn't sure if it was intentional torture or a consequence of not having each others' entire bodies memorized, but at that point he didn't freaking  _care_. Clumsily, with his shoulder digging into the mattress, he reached back and under his raised ass to pump his dick, hoping that was the final piece to the completely awesome puzzle. "Sorry, have to-" his fumbled apology was cut off by a moan that was much louder than he anticipated or intended.   
  
Blaine responded with something involving a groan and warm breath that Kurt didn't care enough to wonder about translating. He felt the boy shifting behind him but only vaguely noticed, his strokes speeding up. As he came with a loud gasping whine, his vision whited out for a moment, just enough that he had to consciously remind himself to start breathing again.  
  
He vaguely cared that he'd come in what seemed to be a pretty spectacular wet spot all over the duvet. Then he felt something warm hit the back of his balls and- Oh holy fuck, Blaine had gotten himself off on tongue-fucking his ass. He moaned softly at the revelation, the mental image it created.  
  
He felt Blaine carefully helping shift him out of the position and flat onto his stomach. "Never... _ever_ ," he ordered emphatically, "apologize for the oral fixation." He added a weak, sated laugh and draped his arm lazily over Blaine's chest.  
  
They should clean up, he knew that, but first he'd have to be able to move and he wasn't sure his limbs could do that yet.


	6. Chapter 6

It had been a kind of strange morning.  
  
Waking up beside Blaine had been...'lovely' was the only word that came to mind, but that was a little overly-flowery even for him. Kind of intertwined together, Blaine spooned up against his back and snoring in a way that was quiet enough to still be cute instead of horribly irritating.  
  
Then Blaine had woken up, too, and things had gotten awkward quickly.  
  
He still wasn't sure why - he was acting exactly the same as he had, though admittedly maybe a little more tactile. He couldn't help himself, brushing Blaine's unruly curls back off his forehead as he leaned in for a good-morning kiss, running his hand slowly along Blaine's arm...he wasn't sure why Blaine kind of stiffened as he did. For one thing, he'd always been far  _less_  touchy than Blaine had - out of habit and instinct more than personal preference. While he could understand not wanting to make out in public, even if they were surrounded by people who wouldn't harass them, he didn't understand why that would be a problem here.   
  
Oh god. Maybe Blaine was having morning-after regret, like he realized the whole thing was a mistake and they should stay friends.  
  
He mumbled something about taking the first shower so they could get on the road and slipped out of bed, wanting desperately to pull the tv cliche of dragging the blanket with him to keep himself covered. Instead he just crept quickly into the bathroom, closing the door behind him and sighing as he started the water.  
  
He didn't understand it - Blaine had been so into it, so into  _him_ , the night before, now he was stiff and awkward and unsure? He felt like he'd found some perfect blend of friendship and 'everything else' that he wanted to replicate over and over again, try and make every relationship feel like this.  
  
After all, if he and Puck could at some point learn to  _speak_ , there was no reason he couldn't have this feeling but twice as much, right? It wasn't as though they had nothing whatsoever in common, it was just harder to pinpoint. But they still enjoyed each other's company even when clothing was on, and with a few minor improvements - none of which would involve trying to change El Puckerone, he promised - he could feel this good all the time.   
  
Except apparently not. Apparently he'd done something wrong and now...  
  
He could read Puck better than he could read Blaine right now, and the thought would have made him literally laugh out loud if it didn't frustrate him so much.  
  
By the time he finished his shower, he felt a little bit better and Blaine seemed more normal. A little hesitant still, like he was trying to keep his distance - something Kurt didn't understand unless Blaine was concerned about being unable to keep from jumping him at all hours of the day and night, a problem about which Kurt suspected he wouldn't complain. But it was better, for the most part. They spent the ride back to Lima arguing over whether Lady Gaga was a visionary or just stole shamelessly from other artists and repackaged it for people who were too young to know the originals (which would have been cause to break up immediately if Kurt didn't happen to know for a fact that Blaine still had both albums on his iPod and a more extensive collection of live bootlegs than his own). the mock indignation and playful jabs at Katy Perry and other absolutely songstresses That Blaine loved and Kurt found less-than-brilliant brought welcome familiarity after the strangeness of the morning.  
  
As he pulled into the driveway, though, he started to worry a little about the funk his other boyfriend had been as of the last he knew. Puck had looked awfully despondent before they left for Sound of Music, and the line about 'just break up with me already' didn't sit well with him. He wasn't trying to, he had no intention of it, and the notion that someone as confident as Puck was feeling threatened was disconcerting.  
  
Maybe he needed to make a more conscious attempt to divide his time more evenly. Even if it seemed to him like he tended to pay more attention to Puck when hanging out in a house with both of them - and he certainly paid more attention to Puck at school - maybe it didn't seem that way to Puck. He could make a better effort in that regard.   
  
He was surprised to find the house empty. No Sarah, no Puck. Sarah might have had one of her dance sleepover weekend things, Kurt thought he vaguely remembered, but finding no sign of Puck downstairs - considering it was already 1 - was strange.  
  
Drawing in a deep breath and with a churning stomach, he climbed the stairs towards Puck's bedroom. He hadlong since learned that just because he didn't hear any moaning didn't mean it wasn't going on, and given how irritated Puck had seemed with him the previous day, considering he'd essentially given Puck an ultimatum ("Stop fucking other people or I'm going out with cute boys"), if he found Puck in bed alone he would be shocked.  
  
He found the bedroom just as empty as the living room.  
  
Pulling his phone from his pocket, he sent a quick text to Puck:  _Hey, where are you? I thought we were going to hang out._  
  
"He's not here?" Blaine asked.  
  
Kurt shook his head. "And so far not answering my texts," he added glumly with a roll of his eyes. He knew what that tended to mean.  
  
He was tempted to say 'fuck it' and spend the day making out with a boy who actually  _wanted_  to spend time with him. But when Puck inevitably came home and walked in at exactly the wrong moment, as would be his luck, that was just going to make things worse. Puck would take it as abandonment even though he was off doing things Kurt didn't even want to picture to god-only-knew-who...okay, it was probably Santana, but maybe not. In any event, he didn't need the sulking that would go with that entire confrontation; better to go home for a few hours or finally collect on the long-overdue mall day with Quinn and Mercedes they kept promising each other but not following through on.  
  
"I should go - I'll see you tomorrow?" he asked with a tired smile and a squeeze of Blaine's hand.  
  
"Yeah, of course," Blaine replied, but his smile was forced. When Kurt leaned in to give him a soft kiss goodbye, the returned kiss was distant and distracted; he didn't know why.  
  
By the time he arrived at home, he half-expected a text from Puck, but still nothing. The radio silence was serving to do nothing but drive him crazy to the point where his urge to drive back over to the house and have sex with Blaine at the top of his lungs all afternoon was increasing by the minute. The thought made him feel queasy, if only because that was manipulative beyond what even he was comfortable with. Using one boy he loved to make the other boy he loved jealous was a bridge too far.   
  
"Hey kid," Burt said, looking up from his coffee as he heard Kurt come in.   
  
"That better be decaf," he instructed.  
  
Burt rolled his eyes but nodded that it was. "I didn't figure I'd see you til late, thought you'd be over hanging out like you usually are."  
  
"Puck's off doing god only knows what, so I'm going to the mall with Quinn and Mercedes."  _They_  had returned his texts, he thought in a tone so bitter even he had to think it sounded petulant.  
  
"How was the Sound of Music thing?"  
  
The question was perfectly innocent, just his dad wanted to know how the thing he'd been looking forward to had gone, but he shifted uncomfortably. As much as he loved the singalong, and as much as he'd enjoyed going with Blaine - despite the weirdness - he still felt guilty talking about it around his dad. Considering the last time and everything.  
  
"It was fine," he replied noncommittally.  
  
"You had fun at Blaine's?"  
  
The problem with being as pale as he was, he concluded, was that every hint of pink showed up immediately. Whether he was crying or blushing it was like his entire face went splotchy and red if he even thought about feeling an emotion. So when his dad asked if he had fun at Blaine's, it took a monumental effort not to turn redder than his shirt or choke on his own tongue. "Yeah, it was good," he smiled a little awkwardly.   
  
Finn watched from the couch - he was supposed to be doing math homework, his mom was on him again which meant Burt was on him about it too, but there was something just really... _weird_  about the way Kurt was talking about going to the thing with Blaine. Like he was-  
  
Oh  _dude_ , he thought with wide eyes. Kurt and Blaine were...doing something, at least. He'd seen them kiss a couple times, which he thought was really weird 'cause Kurt was dating Puck - whose tongue was practically down Kurt's throat like every time he saw the two of them. But he'd thought maybe it was just a gay thing, like how dudes in Europe or wherever kissed each other on the cheek when they saw each other even if they were with their girlfriends. Maybe gay dudes kissed each other like that.  
  
But Kurt was blushing, which meant they'd done more than kissing hello.   
  
When Kurt excused himself to go downstairs to get ready, Finn followed him. "Do you need something?" Kurt asked, heading directly for his closet.  
  
"What's going on between you and Blaine?" he blurted out. He had meant to say it better than that, but he guessed he was lucky he hadn't just asked if they were screwing each other or something.  
  
Kurt spun on his heel and turned to face Finn, eyes wide and indignant. "How is that any of your business?"  
  
"So you're doing something," Finn concluded. "If you weren't, you'd have said something with big words about how I was assuming things."  
  
"You are," Kurt replied coldly. "You're assuming you have any right to say what goes on in my dating life."  
  
"Did you and Puck break up?"  
  
"No," he stated.  
  
"So you're cheating on him? How can you  _do_  that to him? I mean - okay, yeah, I guess the dude's cheated on enough people that at some point it's almost fair, but you can't do that to him. He really likes you, dude," he added, sounding almost betrayed on Puck's behalf.  
  
"He loves me," Kurt corrected, "and I'm not cheating on him."  
  
"But you said Blaine's in our dating life, so that means-"  
  
"We have an arrangement." He strode back into his closet to begin to select an appropriate shopping outfit.  
  
"What kind of arrangement?"  
  
"He can do whatever he wants with whoever he wants - and believe me, he has - and I am free to do the same."  
  
"Wait." Finn looked more confused than usual, like he was trying to figure out how that could work. "So you're dating him...and you're dating Blaine."  
  
"You could say that."  
  
"Dude, that's still cheating. How can you-"  
  
"Finn," Kurt cut him off sharply. "If you could simultaneously date Rachel  _and_  Quinn, assuming she wasn't dating Sam at the time, and they would neither kill each other nor kill you, you would do it in a heartbeat."  
  
"No I wouldn't."  
  
He stood in the doorway of his walk-in, looking at Finn skeptically. "Really."  
  
"You can't say you love someone and then do that to them, dude. You can't say you love someone and then sleep with someone else. Look, I know you don't know what that feels like, but I do, okay? It sucks. And I can't let you do that to Puck - not after you kept jumping up and down on my head to convince me you loved him."  
  
Kurt sighed, closing his eyes. "I was attempting to convince you that your homophobic terror that I had somehow converted Puck to the dark side using my superior sexual skills was unfounded by pointing out that we were in a mutual and loving relationship. That it took you until that point to stop saying that I was covering Puck in my toxic gay sludge is sad enough that you don't get extra points for eventually figuring out that Puck and I love each other. But I'm not doing anything to Puck. He's been sleeping with Santana off and on this entire time - and Brittany at least once, possibly more. If he's not doing anything to hurt me by doing that, then I'm not doing anything to him by sleeping with Blaine."  
  
Finn's eyes bugged out. "You had sex with-"  
  
"Oh dear god," Kurt mumbled, shaking his head. "Again, if you were allowed to sleep with Rachel and-"  
  
"No. I wouldn't," he stated emphatically.  
  
"Okay. So you don't still love Quinn?" Kurt asked. "Because I seem to recall that being your rationale when you finally realized that I was not trying to pursue a disinterested Puck, but instead was attempting to fix something insensitive that I had said without realizing it. You said that it was like how you still loved Quinn and that was why you couldn't hate her even after everything she did to hurt you last year."  
  
"I...yeah, I still love her, but I wouldn't date her and Rachel at the same time."  
  
"Why not?"  
  
"'Cause it's not fair. It's like polytheism or something."  
  
"Polygamy," Kurt corrected, "but not exactly. "We both know exactly what we're getting into. All three of us," he amended.  
  
"Doesn't make it fair to him."  
  
"How is it unfair to him?"  
  
"Because you have two boyfriends and he has one."  
  
"What would he do with a second boyfriend, Finn? He's straight except for me. He has Santana."  
  
"She doesn't count though, she's... _Santana._ "  
  
Kurt's eyes narrowed. "I'm not sure whether to be more offended on my own behalf or on hers. In either event, I'm late for picking up Mercedes. If you'll excuse me, I have things to buy."  
  
"He's been my brother longer," Finn stated, and Kurt stared at him, confused. "I know you're my brother now, but so's he. And we've been family since we were little. I have to look out for him, and I think you're treating him like crap so you can be gay but not get tossed around at school."  
  
It took a few seconds for the accusation to register, and Kurt's jaw dropped before clenching shut. "Get out," he commanded in a low, quivering voice, "And don't talk to me for the foreseeable future." When Finn didn't move, Kurt grabbed his wallet and phone and stormed upstairs, not bothering to select a better outfit. He needed to get out of the room more than he needed the perfect bowtie, and that was saying a lot.  
  
* * * * *  
  
By the time he got the third text, he wondered what part of 'fuck off' didn't translate for Kurt.  
  
"I'm kind of surprised you don't have anything better to do on a Sunday," Shelby stated as she attempted to catch up on a mountain of email.  
  
Puck shrugged, kind of propped on his side on the floor while Beth sat next to him, playing with an annoying-as-hell plinking piano toy. "Whatever."  
  
"Your girlfriend's busy or something?"  
  
"He's out with another guy," Puck replied in his best disaffected tone.  
  
"Ouch," she commented, then added, "...'he'? Really? I figured...most gay teenagers don't exactly end up dads at 16."  
  
"I'm not - just him." Not like it mattered that much, but if he was being honest.  
  
"Oh," she said with a knowing smile. "I had one of those. In college."  
  
Puck raised his eyebrows - of course she did. "I don't know about this piano thing, kid," he said softly with a kind of faint smile as Beth continued to pound on the chunky technicolour keys. "I think we've gotta get you a guitar - at least it wouldn't make me want to tear my eardrums out."  
  
"Just wait until it's been six hours straight," Shelby replied distractedly. "Ugh - this guy keeps sending me things like every three hours. What part of 'I'm the mother of an infant' does he not understand? I'm sorry, I'm not tied to my blackberry like you are. Two days, seven emails, no deadlines. Get a life."  
  
"Prob'ly worse if it were drums or something," Puck supposed. He remembered how much Mrs. H. had wanted to kill the uncle who bought Finn the drum set when they were kids - he thought it was freaking awesome because it meant the could have a real band, like his dad had. Go on tour and get chicks in every city - but, he promised, they'd come back for December. Mrs. H. wouldn't like Finn missing Christmas, and his own mom always seemed to get most mad when his dad was gone in December, something about not pulling his weight. He didn't get it, since Chanukkah was cool and all but not one of the holidays she was really into about being Jewish, but that was the deal.  
  
Could still do it if he really wanted to. Finn probably wouldn't come with him, would probably go to OSU and be the basic all-Ohio good-guy who'd end up back in Lima in four years, teaching at McKinley and going to family dinner ever Friday night. But he could go, tour places and shit. After all, when Kurt went off to his fancy smart-kid artsy school in New York with Blaine, what would he still have in town except Sarah? And she'd be old enough to handle herself by then. He'd send money back to help and everything, not like the deadbeat, would actually bother to call, but maybe...maybe on some level it was better if he didn't hang around too much anyway.   
  
He'd put Kurt in danger without ever having any idea. How the fuck had that happened?  
  
People had been saying he was shit for a long time - pretty much since he was like four or something - but at some point he stopped giving a rat's ass. He ran that school, what he said went. Principals, teachers, they didn't do shit - he ruled the place, and he took care of his own. He looked out for his team. No one pushed Artie around, nobody messed with Brittany even though she was dumber than a sack of rocks, and when he heard kids were teasing Quinn about the baby thing when they came back at the beginning of the year, he hoisted them up the flagpole with the hook so tight they'd never have to worry about accidentally getting someone pregnant. Hell, he even looked out for the fucking elf because the guy was in glee club, if that didn't say he was a benevolent king he didn't know what did.  
  
The fact that Kurt got shit anyway was bad enough. For one thing, it meant his clout was falling - everyone knows he's dating someone and the football players still pick on the guy? That meant fear of his wrath was on the decline, and that wasn't cool. The part where the guy had to go away from him to be safe had fucking sucked. But never in his fucking life had he put the person he was trying to protect in more danger than they'd been in to begin with.  
  
At least, he didn't think so. But he hadn't know this until Kurt got pissed at him, so how the fuck would he know?  
  
He didn't want to be all dramatic and say everything he touched turned to shit or anything, but maybe there was a reason everyone thought he was such a lousy guy, y'know? Maybe he was.   
  
There was a reason guys like Blaine and Sam kept the people he couldn't. They had that thing where they knew what the right thing to do was and he...didn't.  
  
So maybe he'd done at least two things right. Blaine coming into the picture sucked, but at least it kept Kurt alive and all that shit. That was pretty fucking important. And meant he'd kind of still done the best thing for Kurt, even if it wasn't the best thing for him and Kurt.  
  
Like the other thing he'd done right.  
  
He reached out to try to tame down Beth's unruly thatch of hair with a faint smile. "I don't think there's going to be enough product in the world once she becomes a teenager," Shelby said with a grin.  
  
"Sorry," Puck replied with a rueful smile. Quinn had joked about the baby coming out with a mohawk - he wasn't sure how it actually happened, but it was kinda how he knew she was his. Not like Quinn lied to him or anything, just...it was a little thing that meant she belonged to him even if he gave her up.  
  
Hair was a big thing with him and his dad. His mom had normal hair, the kind that did what it was supposed to and laid down and whatever, same with Sarah. His dad had the unruly Sephardic mop that he tried to make look like Gene Simmons' because it was better than what happened in the hair's natural state.  
  
"Hair of the Hebrews - at least you know where you came from, right?" Puck offered quietly. She kind of flailed her arm sideways, trying to grab a toy just out of reach - he automatically grabbed the stupid cloth spider and handed it to her.   
  
He hated feeling like this. Whatever 'this' was, the kind of gnawing sensation in his stomach that went along with feeling like he never wanted to move again. Like everything around him was moving and he was just kind of...there. Not a part of any of it. Beth had a family here and Quinn and Sam was so perfect and cutesy it was nauseating, and Kurt and Blaine were heading the same direction - with their stupid fucking coordinating costumes and their singalongs and their big gay movies.   
  
Having shit in common with the person you were fucking mattered, apparently. Kurt and Blaine had practically everything in common, they were even like the same size and rolled their eyes at the same time. Quinn and Sam, with the dueling-blondeness...It worked for them. Mike and Tina, even if she was technically Tina Cohen-Chang so she should have been a member of the tribe, too. Even Artie and Brittany in a weird way. They were happy - he couldn't begrudge them that. He couldn't really hate on them for that.  
  
"Mine was horrible until I hit college," Shelby replied. "It's so thick, and the second there's an ounce of humidity in the air, forget it." She had set the laptop aside and was lying on the couch just watching them, watching him kind of dance the little spider in front of Beth just out of reach. "Rachel seems to have lucked out on that one - Hiram always had that kind of fine wispy hair, even though when I knew him he hadn't started balding yet." She smiled faintly, then added, "I don't know, I don't really have any pictures from before. She might have just figured out straightening irons and shine serum before last year."  
  
Sh sounded like he felt. Sad, but it was deeper than that - mournful, almost. Wistful. Lonely.  
  
"I prob'ly have some," Puck offered, and her eyes lit up but she tried to cover the pleased expression. "I've known her since we were like four or something - y'know,school, Temple stuff. I could look."  
  
"Yeah?"  
  
"Yeah," he replied with a gentle smile. He kept meaning to take pictures of Beth, it just felt so awkward. Carrying around pictures of his kid on his phone instead of carrying his kid around- it was just kind of weird. Trying to explain that shit...  
  
She would get it, though. They had a lot more in common than he had with anyone his own age - Santana and all her bullshit and jealousy and petty crap? Finn, who thought the year had been hard on  _him_ , of all people? Quinn, who was totally fine with things after like four months and didn't regret it anymore? Kurt had his own issues, but he wasn't ever going to accidentally knock someone up, y'know? Any kid he had was going to be planned like woah, with contracts, and at the end of the day Mercedes - whoever, but it would totally be Mercedes - would be left like this, feeling kind of abandoned and lonely and vulnerable.  
  
...Shelby was kinda hot.   
  
What? He was a sex shark, if he stopped having it he'd die - especially when he felt this shitty about everything. Of anyone who would understand that, it would be Kurt, and he hadn't changed anything. The rules were still the rules, which was why he knew Kurt was totally fucking around with prepster-boy while he was sitting there. Sex was a totally valid way of feeling good.  
  
She was totally responding to his smile, too, which was always a good sign. Not like chicks ever  _didn't_  - even Quinn couldn't resist the charming grin. And she was sort of a double-MILF, too, which was new. Because she was sort of the mom of his kid, for all intents and purposes, but she was a MILF in her own right. But awhile ago, which sometimes meant things were tighter again. He'd gotten kind of used to ass lately, so tight was gonna be key. She'd had her kid-  
  
...sixteen years ago. And he'd  _made out with her_.  
  
Yeah, he couldn't do it. Couldn't go there. He was about as lax as a person could be when it came to placing rules and restrictions on what constituted 'appropriate' for sex (to the point where, when all the other guys were thinking of Beiste to calm down, he couldn't come up with an anti-sex because he could find the hot in almost freaking anyone), but fucking a woman whose daughter he'd gone to second base with was just gross even for him.  
  
"I've gotta go."  
  
* * * * *  
  
"Just like that?"  
  
"Just like that," Kurt replied angrily, flicking through the sweaters and taking pride in the satisfying 'clink' of the hangers against one another as they slid along the metal rod at an increasing velocity as his resentment surged. "He actually said that I was dating Puck so that I could keep myself protected while I fooled around with Blaine on the side."  
  
"Wow," Quinn said, staring. "I mean, he's Finn so he can be oblivious about how things sound, but that's..."  
  
"Yes," Kurt replied tightly.  
  
"What did you say?" Mercedes asked, holding up a jacket. Kurt shook his head and kept looking.  
  
"To get out of my room and not speak to him for the foreseeable future."  
  
"And then?"  
  
"I left," he stated. Rolling his eyes at the inadequate selection of men's outerwear, he walked across the store to the women's department.  
  
"So where does that leave you?" Quinn asked.  
  
"Other than contemplating fratricide?" he asked dryly.  
  
"Are you and Puck...?"  
  
"Exactly where we were a week ago," he stated, confused by the question. The relationship was open, he wasn't the first one to have sex with someone else by any stretch of the imagination, why would it have changed anything as far as he and Puck were concerned? He and Blaine, sure, the addition of sex to a relationship was apparently something that was meant to be a big deal - he wouldn't know, he'd never had a relationship before the sex part before. But from what he'd read, and judging by how standoffish Blaine had been this morning.  
  
"Are you sure?"  
  
Kurt blinked and looked at her. "Do you know something I don't?"  
  
"No. I can't remember the last time I talked to him about anything outside of glee club. But it seems like something has to be different now, right?"  
  
"Quinn...and I mean this in the nicest possible way...but when the relationship is open so that everyone knows who's sleeping with whom, it doesn't cause quite as much drama as when you do it behind the person's back and end up pregnant," he stated in as gentle a matter-of-fact tone as he could manage. Her jaw and mouth tightened a little and he offered an apologetic half-smile. "He's the one who decided to start acting weird before I even went on the date, so I don't know what the issue is."  
  
"Weird how?" Mercedes asked as she picked up a hat.  
  
"I hesitate to use the word 'whiny' because that makes him sound too young and not very Puck-like, but I would say there was a certain degree of annoyance expressed in a less-than-mature way. Don't even think about it," he added as he saw her eyeing a hideous vibrant pink sweater.  
  
"What happened?" Quinn asked.  
  
Kurt shook his head. "There's nothing here - on to the next?" he asked, and they acquiesced as he led the way; they had learned not to cross Kurt when he was on a shopping mission. Idle browsing for pieces he 'needed' was one thing; finding a suitable outfit for a specific event in three days was another matter entirely. "I went to go pick up Blaine and Puck was being sullen, so I asked him why he hadn't said anything if this was bothering him and he claimed it wasn't - but it was - and then he said something about how I should just break up with him already. I told him that wasn't what I planned on doing. I love him - I do. And I'm not sitting here clinging to him like a life raft and waiting for some better boat to come along, unlike what  _some_  people might believe," he added with a roll of his eyes. "I also pointed out that, if he was so concerned, if he wanted to close the relationship he knew where to find me - but it had to be mutual. I'm not going to break up with Blaine if he's still sleeping with Santana. Why should I? Anyway, he didn't seem to have much to say that one, so I said I'd see him today once I was back. now he's ignoring me, which means either he's tried to break up with me or he's having sex." His eyes lit up as he spotted a white buttondown shirt with diagonal pin-tucking and he went to check it out.   
  
"How do you know it's one of those?" Quinn asked.  
  
"Because he's Puck?" Mercedes replied like it was obvious.  
  
"As much as it pains me to say it...because he's Puck," Kurt confirmed. "He's done both before - and I'm not complaining. If he wants to screw every woman in town again, he's free to do that. But he doesn't get to decide he gives a shit about monogamy when it's over me falling in love with a second person."  
  
The admission slipped out before he realized it; Mercedes' squeal was the first indication he'd said anything. Quinn just looked uneasy, like she wasn't sure what to say or how to say it nicely enough. "Awww! Are you serious?" Mercedes was practically beaming for him. "Though I have to say - how precisely do you manage to get  _two_  fine boys to date and I still don't have one. Aren't best friends supposed to share?"  
  
"You dumped one of them already, and the other is only interested in guys." Very,  _very_  inerested in guys. Very interested in him  _as_  a guy, which was somehow more meaningful to him than he anticipated - especially since Puck had never outwardly or consciously treated him like a substitute for a girl. He wasn't sure what exactly it was that was different, but it was...and it was more than just Blaine's reaction to his dick. "But I am going to a party this week with about twenty straight guys, most of whom don't currently have girlfriends, so if you want to make me a wish list - height ranges; hobbies and interests; hair-, eye-, and skin- colour; stock options-" She gave him her best 'seriously? Okay, now I need to hit you' look, and he shrugged. "I'm more than happy to checklist some boys for you. Or...on second thought, I should just set you up with Ethan." He smiled as he selected the shirt in his size and went in search of pants.  
  
"Kurt-" Quinn sounded hesitant, concerned. "I'm not saying you can't be in love with two people, I am the master of falling for more than one boy at once, but believe me when I tell you that it's never... _never_  going to end well." Her eyes were full of worry - though he honestly wasn't sure whether it was for him or for Puck - as she placed her slim hand on his forearm.  
  
"Why can't it?" he asked. "Everyone knows. Everyone's on board. It's fundamentally different than your situation last year, or if Finn decided he wanted to get back together with you now while you and Sam are together. Besides," he added, a bit of defensive defiance slipping into his tone and his gaze. "Why shouldn't I get to be happy? After waiting forever to find a guy who didn't find me fundamentally repulsive, who doesn't find my mere existence threatening...why shouldn't I be allowed to enjoy this?"  
  
He was enjoying it more than he felt comfortable with, if he was being honest with himself. He felt like he was pitting them against each other just by existing, let alone by reveling in the attention it brought him. But having two guys want to take him on dates in the same week? He'd never imagined he'd be so lucky. He'd never thought in his wildest dreams that one guy would reciprocate feelings for him until maybe someone when he got out of Ohio; now two guys wanted him. Why shouldn't he want that? Why shouldn't he want to feel that way?  
  
They gave him such different things. If he was dating just one, it still wouldn't be quite perfect, but between the two...it was everything he could possibly want. Didn't he deserve that? Didn't he deserve to be as blissfully, sappily happy as Quinn and Sam looked when they walked down the hall holding hands? There were things he was still never going to get to do no matter how many boys he dated, shouldn't he get the rest to make up for it?  
  
It was just starting to feel more complicated than that. Like everything he did was keeping score - like if he spent time with Blaine it wasn't fair to Puck and if he spent time with Puck it wasn't fair to Blaine. What was next? A chart to make sure he was fucking them equally? A colour-coordinated date calendar to make sure they spent equal amounts of time together? Because while Blaine seemed perfectly content in his role, Puck was starting to sulk and that didn't bode well for anyone.   
  
"Of course you should - you know I think that," she stated. "Of course you deserve to be happy. But so do they. If they aren't..."  
  
"They are," he stated with more confidence than he felt. "If they - read: Puck - aren't, I made perfectly clear what the options are and he knows where to find me."  
  
Quinn looked uneasy again, like she wanted to tell him he was dead wrong, and he knew it - he did, his chest ached enough for him to know she was right without her saying a word.   
  
* * * * *  
  
Puck may not have been the single easiest person to track down at school - that distinction went to either Kurt because his hats were easy to spot, or Finn for his sheer height advantage - but he was easy enough. She knew his hangouts well enough to find him without too much difficulty, hanging out over by the weight room.  
  
"You're coming with me," Quinn ordered. When Puck just raised his eyebrows in a 'you can't be serious' expression, she added, "We need to talk."  
  
"I thought when I wasn't dating you anymore I got to stop hearing that."  
  
"We have a problem," she stated. "You? Are an  _idiot_."


	7. Chapter 7

  
He'd been trying not to be an ass.  
  
No, seriously. He'd been trying not to go around school being a douchebag. He knew nobody dug on the whiney thing - Santana had made that more than clear - and pouting in public was just fucking pathetic. But the alternative was torturing losers, and that would be the surest way for Kurt to ditch him right now. The guy wouldn't even have to make it about liking Blaine better then, he would have his own excuse. Something along the lines of how he couldn't trust Puck now because how could he know he wouldn't be next or some bullshit like that because they both knew better, but Kurt got really sensitive about what he did to other dweebs.  
  
Not that Kurt had ever been a dweeb, but that wasn't the point.  
  
It went double now that Kurt was pissed at him over outing Karofsky - he should've been fucking grateful. He should've been throwing Puck a 'thank you for saving me' party because it got Karofsky expelled which was the reason Kurt could strut down the halls in his ridiculous kneelength sweaters again and not worry about getting checked into his locker. That was the first reason Kurt was safe; the second reason was because he was dating the biggest badass in the school and everyone knew it. If people thought Puckzilla had gone soft, his rep would be screwed and so would Kurt.  
  
Meaning Kurt should  _want_  him hurling losers into dumpsters and hoisting them up flagpoles by their underwear. He should want hourly reports about how many times Jacob ben Israel had wet himself with fear.  
  
But for whatever reason, Kurt didn't get that part, so he was stuck without an outlet for his anger. He knew from experience that wasn't a good thing - not unless he could corner some hot chick for sex in the janitor's closet again - so he was trying - even though it was  _really fucking hard_  - not to be an ass.   
  
Meaning he really did not feel like dealing with Quinn and whatever her issues were today. Anything that started with her coming up and trying to drag him off somewhere to talk was gonna suck, and there were enough shitty conversations he was avoiding with the person who was still dating him. He didn't need to have them with the person who'd broken up with him.  
  
His first response was a joke about how she was sounding awfully hormonal this morning and maybe blondie had finally gotten some. He responded instead with a disinterested line about how he shouldn't be getting 'we have to talk' lectures from someone he wasn't dating.  
  
See? He was trying  _not_  to be an ass. It just took a lot of effort.  
  
"We have a problem. You? Are an  _idiot._ "  
  
"Thanks. Don't you have a makeout session with Justin Bieber scheduled?" he replied with a roll of his eyes. He hadn't even done anything to her lately. He hadn't even talked to her in weeks - not like he was avoiding her or whatever, they just kind of steered clear of each other at school. Not like he spent a lot of time talking to Cheerios other than Kurt these days, and he was busy. So unless she was going to try to come bitch him out for seeing his own fucking daughter, there was absolutely no reason he needed to listen to her.  
  
"By all means, dismiss my relationship instead of worrying about your own."  
  
He wanted to go off on her for that one, but he still had some pride left. Not a lot, it was getting pretty much crushed like his nuts in a vice or something, but enough that he wasn't gonna go around whining about Kurt being 'emotionally distant' or whatever shit the girls would call it. He was a dude, a stud; he didn't do that.  
  
He cared, sure. He just wasn't gonna go around telling people about it. It wasn't anyone's fucking business but his anyway.  
  
He walked off down the hall but she followed him, books clutched tightly against her chest. "You're going to lose him. Do you even care?"  
  
"Thanks for the update," he hurled back dryly. "Tell me something I don't know."  
  
"He thinks that his relationship with Blaine is the same thing as you and Santana, but you and I know it's not. We both know you're not in love with Santana."  
  
That meant Kurt was in love with Blaine. Oh god. Not like he didn't know - it was obvious, the way they acted, it was...it was like Quinn acted around Sam or the disgusting way Finn and Rachel slobbered all over each other even when they weren't making out. But the way she said it-  
  
"We both know your hooking up with her is filling some kind of void."  
  
"Why does it have to be some kind of void?" he asked defensively. "What if I just like sex? Not all of us are the queen of the chastity ball - it feels good. Why the fuck shouldn't I get it on as much as possible?"  
  
Her eyes narrowed. "Because right now you're prioritizing hooking up with the town bike over the person you love. And it's not the first time."  
  
"Who said anything about my being in love with Kurt?" he asked.  
  
He was, but no one needed to know that part. When Kurt dumped him for the only guy in the world shorter than him, they'd all assume he'd just been enjoying Kurt's ass and the way Kurt sucked him off. Kind of like they all assumed he'd gotten off with Quinn once and ended up accidentally stuck with her for awhile after that thanks to a lack of contraception. No one knew he loved her; no one had to know this time, either.  
  
He didn't know why that part mattered, but it did. Probably because loving someone meant it hurt when they left, and no one saw Puckasaurus hurt. Puckasaurus didn't  _get_  hurt. People left - big goddamn fucking deal, he wasn't some weak little punk. Sleeping with a guy hadn't turned him into some pathetic weeping fairy.  
  
"You are," she stated with a quiet certainty, looking him directly in the eye in a way that made him kind of uncomfortable. "Tell whoever else whatever you want to preserve your stupid reputation, but don't ever treat me like I'm some random girl. We know each other better than that."  
  
He wanted to hurl some snappy comeback at her, something that would be a low enough blow that she wouldn't want to talk to him again for awhile, but he couldn't quite bring himself to. Maybe she had a point about her not being like everyone else. In that moment, he hated her for it.  
  
"I know you've built your whole reputation on never being the guy who chases the girl, you're so much of a stud they come to you or whatever ridiculous line you want to use this week. But this is different. You need to step up and tell him you want him and only him."  
  
"Why?" he asked flippantly. "I don't lie about shit, why start now?"  
  
"Because it's not going to hurt if you lose Santana and it's going to destroy you if you lose Kurt."  
  
There it was. The thing he'd been avoiding thinking about with as much strength as he could. Because when Kurt left him for Blaine, it was going to be back to him and Santana and guest appearances by Brittany, and somewhere along the line that had stopped feeling like enough.  
  
Kurt might not feel like everything he wanted, but he was probably more than enough. Not like Puck had tried it, so he couldn't say for sure, but something about it felt...like maybe. Like a better than even chance.  
  
But he was never going to be enough for Kurt, so that meant it didn't really fucking matter, did it?   
  
"Whatever. He gets to be happy like anyone else, he can go for what he wants," he stated, leaving unspoken the key part: what Kurt wanted was never going to be him - not when this was the contest. He could maybe -  _maybe_  - beat Finn in a contest now, if only because Finn had been enough of a jackass in the previous six months that Kurt was over him.   
  
"So you're keeping him at arm's length because you think that'll make him happy," she stated dryly, making very clear that she thought it was some bullshit copout.  
  
It wasn't. Kurt didn't realize yet that was what the best thing was for him, that it was what he'd want eventually anyway...that it was really what he wanted now, but he hadn't had it put to him that way yet. He simply shrugged.  
  
"That is the single biggest piece of crap I have ever heard you try to pass off, and that's saying a lot considering how many times I heard you try to cover for something with your mother." She rolled her eyes. "You don't shove someone away to make them happy."  
  
"Sure you do. We did," he replied, and she recoiled, eyes wide and stunned and fucking  _hurt_.  
  
"How can you bring her into this?" Quinn demanded in a low hiss that Puck suspected was just barely covering her 'I'm about to start crying but I'm not allowed to because I'm in this uniform in the middle of school' voice.  
  
"I'm not bringing her into anything. We gave her up so she could have a life we couldn't give her - that's the definition of getting rid of someone to make them happy," he replied shortly before striding off down the hall. Sure - nice, Quinn. Go shove someone into a conversation they don't want to be part of, about a lot of shit that's none of your fucking business, then get pissed when they bring something you don't want to talk about into the conversation.   
  
She never had fought fair.  
  
But something she'd said was pissing him off more than her unrighteous indignation over his point. He spun back to face her. "And you think I don't want him to be happy - that I'm lying about that? You have no fucking idea. If I didn't, why would I have even brought the asshole here in the first place, huh?" He shook his head. "Whatever," he added as he turned back again and walked down the hall.  
  
She caught up to him by the time he turned the corner. "What do you mean, you wouldn't have brought him here?" she asked, practically cornering him by a locker.   
  
He may have been the strongest guy in school, but he wasn't about to push a girl. What kind of punk did that?  
  
"You mean Blaine, right? What do you mean, you brought Blaine here? The guy quit his old school in protest over Kurt getting kicked out, didn't he? I mean, that's what he's telling everyone and he may be a little too charming for his own good but I don't think he'd lie about that, so what do you even-"  
  
"I gave him a place to stay," Puck said to cut off her rambling series of questions.  
  
"Kurt was calling all of us, asking," she said slowly, eyes narrowing as she tried to figure out what precisely Puck was getting at.  
  
"Yeah, he was. And when none of you could step up and give him a place to crash, he was gonna have to go to some other school and leave Kurt here undefended. So I manned up and let him stay with me." When Quinn didn't have a response other than to stare at him, he added, "I didn't even know the guy or like him that much - I'd met him like twice, he was already all googoo-eyed over Kurt but I figured whatever, they were best friends, right?"  
  
"Why?" she asked quietly.  
  
"Why what?"  
  
"Why would you let him stay with you if you knew he had a crush on your boyfriend?" Her words were slow, as though she was trying to work out the answer to that question herself while waiting for Puck's response.  
  
Puck glanced sideways, checking that no one around cared enough to listen, then quietly said, "Look, you didn't see him. He was...think about the worst day you had last summer and multiply it by, like, fifty. Dude was fucked up. That school was the only thing keeping him from going completely crazy and then Mr. Schue went and wrecked it and he got sent back to where he came from with kids who hated him?" He hadn't been able to protect Kurt the first time around, why would Kurt have felt any safer the second time? "Blaine had some crazy idea about a buddy system, and it was shit but it was the first time Kurt had looked normal in like a week - I mean, normal for him, he still looked kinda freaky," he added, but without any of the real malice or annoyance the aside would have once had. More like he recognized and acknowledged that there were parts of Kurt he would never understand but liked anyway. "His dad shot down the idea of Blaine moving in there, and none of you could take him, so I said I would. Guy looked ready to OD on something and not recreationally. Who wouldn't do it?" Quinn's eyes had gotten progressively wider over the course of the conversation and were now to almost comical proportions in relation to the rest of her face, her mouth agape just enough to look stunned but not like a cartoon - not quite yet, at least. "What?" he asked flippantly.  
  
"You invited the guy who had a crush on your boyfriend to live with you because you thought your boyfriend was going to kill himself," she summarized. "Puck..." When he didn't object or reframe the story, she asked, "Does Kurt know why you-"  
  
"No," he replied, annoyed. Why would Kurt know? What the fuck was that conversation going to look like: "Here, dude, I thought you looked suicidal so I brought you a guy who likes Vogue"? Fucking please.   
  
It wouldn't occur to him to say anything, she realized slowly. When people told him what they expected of him - usually next to nothing - he wasn't someone who spoke up and protested. He would try to take credit for the most ridiculous shit but didn't actually say anything that mattered.  
  
"You didn't think it would be a good idea to talk to him first?" He rolled his eyes. "Right - Puckzilla doesn't talk," she replied dryly. "Except about Super Mario Brothers and sometimes Crash Bandacoot. I don't know why I'm surprised - he does the exact same thing except with the new Marc by Marc Jacobs line. You two really do deserve each other, don't you?" She shook her head, ponytail swaying after her movement stopped. "I know you think that's normal - I thought it was when we were together-" He didn't feel like pointing out that they had only ever been together in like ten-minute intervals because she didn't exactly keep dating him while she was pregnant. "But it's not. You have to talk sometime."  
  
"We talk."  
  
"Right."  
  
"We do," he replied angrily. She never even saw the two of them together except sometimes in the hall at school, what the fuck would she know? As much as he mocked her and Sam, he didn't try to tell her what to actually do in the relationship - that wasn't his fucking job. She wasn't exactly skilled at keeping a relationship together any better than he was anyway, only in her case it was because she got bored and insecure and wanted someone else.  
  
They weren't all that different. He was just more honest about it.  
  
But he couldn't say that to her. He hated her for being different to him - anyone else he could have just gotten out of the conversation already with a well-placed low blow, but they were past that point.  
  
"About something other than sex?" she asked skeptically.  
  
"Yes," he said shortly. They did. They talked about other things, it just didn't always go as well as he would have liked. And it wasn't about as many of the topics as Kurt probably would have liked. But they did talk about things. He just didn't see the point in having a conversation that wouldn't be anything more than picking a fight that would end with Kurt running off to Blaine for consolation and him bored in his room and wondering if screwing Santana again would really give Kurt enough of a reason to break up with him even though they were doing the  _exact same fucking thing_ , only Kurt actually loved the guy.  
  
Every time he thought that sentence, he felt the anger and nausea starting to dissipate, like the more times he heard it he would get calmer and calmer about it until it didn't bother him.  
  
He wasn't sure if that was progress or not.  
  
He turned to walk off down the hall. Quinn had the good sense not to follow him, apparently realizing he'd been chastised more for things he hadn't actually fucked up than he needed to be in one day. But she did call after him, "Tell him you want to close things."  
  
It sounded like a desperate ploy even in her voice, and she had a way of making things sound rational and plausible that other people often lacked. He didn't even want to think about what it would sound like if he said it.


	8. Chapter 8

While most of the awkwardness from the other morning had dissipated by the time they drove out to David's for the party, there was still something about Blaine that felt hesitant. It wasn't all the time - most of the time he sounded completely normal, though like they were back into that creepy and potentially-disastrous 'friends zone' thing Kurt had been worried about on Saturday. Then there would be moments where Blaine would get that special smile, the one like he wanted to shout from the rooftops that Kurt was his boyfriend - the one that looked like Blaine kissed: sweet and kind of shyly grateful. But it almost always disappeared quickly, replaced by the fake plastered grin that Kurt was starting to figure out was what Blaine looked like when he was trying to hide what he actually felt.  
  
He hadn't thought much about Blaine's masks before, his walls. He knew Blaine had them, obviously, and he'd seen the kind of shocked crumbling when they first started at McKinley - well, when Blaine first started, when he started for the second time. But he knew enough to know that that look was total mask territory - it was the equivalent of his judgmental icequeen glare or Puck's 'whatever, bored now' look. Though the idea of defaulting to pretending to be something  _happy_  was completely foreign to him, he wondered if it felt any better than defaulting to pretending not to care.  
  
Probably not. And they really amounted to the same thing, didn't they?  
  
What he didn't understand was why that look was making an appearance so frequently around and about  _him_  these days.  
  
He was probably overthinking it, he realized. Even though they'd known each other awhile, the relationship was still new. He and Puck had kept masks around each other at least in part for easily the first month or more and let them slip gradually; it wasn't like flipping a switch after a big moment. Just because he'd never been able to play the ice queen around Blaine didn't mean that somehow Blaine didn't have reasons to pretend not to be nervous or vulnerable.  
  
He just wished Blaine would tell him already so they could move past whatever this was.  
  
Talking would probably be too much to hope for with a boyfriend, wouldn't it? he thought with a smirk and a roll of his eyes. Being straightforward about what was bothering someone - clearly he asked for too much.  
  
At least when Blaine wasn't talking about what he was annoyed over, he was still speaking instead of doing the half-sulking avoidance thing Puck was currently pulling.  
  
Kurt had finally started to get used to the size of Blaine's house - and the assumed size of his parents' collective assets. He'd gotten used to the idea that a grand staircase in the foyer and a few dozen extra rooms was totally normal for some people; it helped that he mostly only ever saw Blaine's room, which was like what Kurt's bedroom would look like on steroids. It wasn't such a foreign concept, and he was starting to lose the feeling that he'd been essentially a very poor spy in rich-kid land for the month he'd been at Dalton.  
  
Until he saw David's house.  
  
He wasn't sure why it hadn't occurred to him that Blaine's house wasn't necessarily the largest of the Warblers'. That Blaine's family probably wasn't the richest one at Dalton - they were solidly upper-class, they weren't in that uber-wealthy, celebrity-level echelon. David, on the other hand...  
  
Blaine laughed as he saw Kurt's expression. "Don't crash into anything," he teased, as Kurt seemed to be unable to tear his eyes away from the mansion.  
  
"Sorry," Kurt replied too quickly as he maneuvered his car into a free spot. It looked like most of the group was here already, depending on how many of them had carpooled or anything. There were about fifteen or eighteen cars parked along the fountain that reminded Kurt of the one in front of the Von Trapp house; the cars didn't come close to making the driveway look crowded.  
  
"I probably should have warned you - David's family's kind of in that 'crazy rich even for us' category," Blaine replied with a grin. "His dad owns practically every tv station in the state, and his stepmom is the kind of person who likes to...shall we just say show off a little." Kurt quirked an eyebrow. "She wants to be on Real Housewives of Columbus."  
  
Kurt laughed. "Please tell me they're not actually making that. We are nowhere near fabulous enough here to have that - and without the trashy-train-wreck factor of Atlanta or New Jersey."  
  
"I highly doubt it," Blaine confirmed solemnly. "But there's no telling her that. Oh well - it makes the place absolutely perfect for parties though."  
  
Kurt smiled faintly as he got out of the car, pulling himself into the most proper-and-pressed, attitude-sporting mode he could. It was something he'd been doing subconsciously since he was probably five - he remembered it being something he started by trying to emulate his mother and then it took on such a life of its own that she teased him good-naturedly about it. Something about trying to pretend he wasn't as awkward and blue-collar as he was, trying to seem much more sophisticated than any boy in Lima could possibly be, a combination of his mother's grace and the snobby New Yorkers he saw on tv. It had gotten worse for the first few weeks at Dalton before he learned to relax, but it still popped up occasionally for things like this.  
  
He felt Blaine's arm encircle his waist as the word "Relax," was whispered in his ear. His legs almost turned to jelly at the feeling of Blaine's hot breath against his neck. He turned to look at the guy and saw a gentle smile. "Just remember you've seen him literally fall out of his car because he got his pantleg stuck on the door." Kurt laughed and rolled his eyes, but the point was made.  
  
He allowed Blaine to lead him up the front steps and into the largest front hall he'd ever seen. He could already hear laughter coming from the kitchen, bad music coming from the living room blasting on a pretty loud surround system-  
  
And the squeal. The highpitched "Omigod!" as a lanky figure with a fauxhawk hurled itself at Kurt.  
  
"Missed you too, Charlie," Kurt replied dryly, but he was smiling. Blaine was being no help, only barely keeping himself from laughing - there was a lot of lip-biting as his eyes teared up. And with that, Kurt was whisked away to discuss their nearly-matching designer boots and what had happened on RuPaul's Drag Race last week. Blaine smiled and shook his head, then wandered into the herd of Warblers waiting to greet him with enthusiastic "We missed you"'s.  
  
* * * * *  
  
Blaine leaned against the marble countertop with a rum and coke - he would have exactly one drink and spend the rest of the night laughing at those who didn't have his sense of limitation. Most of the Warblers had moved their way into the living room and started up the karaoke game; it was downright sad how many of the guys, who could harmonize beautifully and had amazing voices and perfect pitch, couldn't sing along with a plinky recorded track to save their life. By the third try, they had given up even trying to win and instead were just making up impromptu lyrics with random acts of harmony.  
  
That didn't mean they had given up trying to dance, something for which Blaine was incredibly grateful. Where else would he get so much entertainment for awhile?  
  
"So," Charlie said, sidling up to him. He got more sibilant when he was in a good mood; Blaine had forgotten that. When he'd first met Charlie he'd thought at least some of it had to be an act, playing up what he thought gay men were meant to sound like, but the more he knew him...it's just who the guy was. He had to respect that - and even moreso now that he saw how much extra crap Kurt caught for being himself than he ever had. Even at McKinley, Kurt got more looks and comments than he did; while the physical violence had largely stopped through a combination of fear, social status, and a lack of bully-leadership, the 'what is  _that_?' look was omnipresent. Kurt barely noticed it, but he did - it made him angry. It made him want to stand up on top of the desks and yell "I'm as gay as he is, why do you only treat him like that?"  
  
He had transferred there to make sure Kurt was safe, to try and protect him a little, and so far his only contribution had been to make sure Kurt stood up for himself when that Karofsky guy had tried to strangle him. Everything else had been either Puck, or Kurt's own doing. Apparently the Cheerios uniform was more powerful than he'd expected; Kurt hadn't been exaggerating how much clout they had. He felt sometimes like he was just kind of...there. Hanging out with his best friend, yeah, and that was never a bad thing. He didn't regret resigning, not after what they'd done, but he'd had these ideas of how he'd be able to help and so far none of them were really as successful as he'd hoped.  
  
People kind of liked him there. He couldn't figure that part out. The girls liked him, at least, and more than a few of the guys thought he was at least goofy enough to be the resident comedian. He wasn't  _popular_ , but he wasn't a punching bag. He couldn't- Not that he couldn't figure out why, he had more confidence than that, but given how Kurt had been treated, he had kind of expected a lot more homophobic something. Instead he got exactly as much crap as Mike, who was on the football team but not known primarily for being an athlete anymore.  
  
Charlie would get even more shit than Kurt over there. He wondered if the guy had any idea.  
  
"Yes?" he replied simply with a faint smile.  
  
"I see you didn't come aloooone," he teased.  
  
"Do you know how long the drive is from Lima?" Blaine replied, but he knew what Charlie was getting at.  
  
"So he's still 'just a friend'?" Charlie looked disappointed; Blaine wondered if that meant he'd lost a bet. It wouldn't be the first pool in Warblers' history.  
  
"No," Blaine replied honestly, unable to hide the faint smile. He was dating Kurt. That adorably hot guy sitting across the room, perched on the arm of the couch and dancing geekily while a few of the guys tried to recreate the Destiny's Child video for 'Say My Name, was his  _boyfriend_.  
  
At least, he thought so.  
  
"Ooo!" Charlie grinned, almost clapping with excitement. "I knew it! I can't wait to tell Wes he lost this one."  
  
"How much was the pool this time?"  
  
"Just bragging rights," Charlie replied dismissively. "Okay, where do they think they are? A 'Vogue' video contest?" he asked, looking as the very straight guys tried to strike poses to beats in the music. "I've gotta say," he began, walking around the counter to mix himself a drink. "I'm kind of surprised he broke up with the badass - not that I"m not happy for you, I think you make  _much_  more sense for him, but he seemed so into the guy. At least judging by the way they kissed in the parking lot. Speaking of which, do you know if the badass is available?"  
  
"Not exactly," Blaine replied cryptically. He wasn't sure he wanted to go into this with the guy who wasn't the most reliable when it came to secrets.  
  
"Too bad," Charlie said with an exaggerated sigh. "Not surprised he got snatched up quickly though - but don't you think we'd look cute? With his mohawk and my hair? And he'd be just a little bit taller than me..."  
  
The idea of Puck even meeting Charlie, let alone trying to date him, was enough to make Blaine laugh. "Sorry - first, you're not his type, second...he's not entirely broken up with Kurt."  
  
Charlie froze mid-pour, and Blaine supposed he should just be glad the bottle was tilted upward just enough to prevent cranberry juice from continuing to flow. "So you're...what? His rebound-boy?"  
  
"More like his second boyfriend."  
  
Charlie put down the bottle and clapped a hand over his mouth, trying hard not to laugh, eyes twinkling. "Of all the boys I expected to form a harem, I've gotta say that Kurt isn't it."  
  
"It's not a harem."  
  
"He has two hot boyfriends. What is it. Unless- oh my god, tell me you're getting to sleep with both of them?"  
  
"No," Blaine replied. That would be horrible - not because Puck wasn't attractive, but because he would spend the entire time feeling small and ugly compared to the other two guys in bed. Not to mention Kurt would ignore him alltogether, especially considering the other night...  
  
"Too bad. You need to make that happen. The guy is like sex on wheels," Charlie stated, searching for a lime wedge for his cosmo.  
  
"That's the problem," Blaine mumbled. "Can I ask you about something?"  
  
"Didn't you?" Charlie replied with a smirk as he tasted the drink, considered, and added a little more marinier.   
  
"When you've been with guys have you ever..." he hesitated. He felt like an idiot - this was a ridiculous conversation to even have. He'd always thought the idea of girls standing around talking about issues they were having with sex was the most absurd thing he'd ever heard of. But his only other alternative was to second-guess himself forever, and he wasn't sure he could sleep with Kurt again until he got past this particular block.  
  
He supposed his other other alternative was to ask Kurt, but that was definitely out of line.  
  
"So the other night we went out, we went back to my house because my parents were out of town, and things start progressing." He glanced furtively towards the living room to make sure that no one else appeared to be listening in, and that Kurt was still safely on the other side of the room. "And it kept feeling...I don't know, like he wasn't really into it. He would seem to be, then be really distracted and distant for awhile. Like he was thinking of, I don't know, his homework or something. I gave him every chance to say he wasn't interested, that he thought we should be friends instead because the whole night felt kind of friends-ish, but he kept saying no, he wanted to, advancing things along, but still not really into things. Then all of a sudden he starts sounding practically porn-ish and like he's  _really_ into it, and I guess what I'm trying to ask is...have you ever gotten the feeling someone's basically thinking of someone else when you're in bed?"  
  
Charlie stared at him, bug-eyed and looking more than a little disturbed. "I don't even-...why would you ask  _me-_ "  
  
"Because as great as all the guys are, you're the only other Warbler who's gay. I can't exactly ask the guys who are dating girls, there's an entirely different...physical issue," Blaine pointed out reasonably.  
  
Charlie still looked like he was at a loss. He downed about half his overly-pink drink in one swallow, then set the half-full cup on the counter. "Okay, let's start with...what makes you think he was thinking of someone else? And I assume by 'someone else' you mean the other guy."  
  
"Puck, yeah."  
  
"Puck! I knew it was Shakespeare but thought 'Mercutio' was an uncommon name these days, and if he were named Falstaff I would have made way too many bad jokes. What makes you think he was thinking of Puck."  
  
"Why else would he suddenly get really into-"  
  
"Have you considered that you started doing something he really liked?"  
  
"I don't think so. Timing-wise it would be weird."   
  
"What do you mean?"  
  
"It was sort of in the middle of something, not as I started something new." He thought, at least. With so many times of stiffening and relaxing a hair before he finally started enjoying himself, Blaine couldn't entirely guarantee that was right, but it was the impression he'd been wrestling with since Sunday morning so he trusted it.  
  
"How could he be thinking of someone else? You're not my type, but you're gorgeous and you were  _right there_ ," Charlie pointed out.  
  
"He wasn't exactly in a position to be looking at me," Blaine mumbled because he could not believe he was having this conversation.  
  
"Blaine!" Charlie grinned wickedly.   
  
"That's the closest to detailed you're getting," he replied with a teasing smile, but it faded as he stared into his mostly-empty cup. He sighed and shook his head, watching as Kurt chatted happily with Ethan. He'd heard something about setting the guy up with Mercedes which made more sense the longer he hung out with Mercedes. "He's just so...you've seen Puck but you haven't  _seen_ \- The two of them have the most amazing sexual chemistry. I know Kurt's deeper than that, but it's important. Everything the two of us do feels like a competition now, and even though Puck acts like I'm winning - I don't think I do as often as he seems to think I do...Kurt doesn't really seem like he wants anything more than friendship. We go to movies, we go to dinner, we go to shows and we sing, but all of that's stuff we've done since I met him. If he wanted me, why wouldn't he make a move on any of it? Why wouldn't he- I don't know, do something?"  
  
"Have you tried making moves? Other than the sex stuff?" Charlie asked.  
  
"Every time I do, he kind of freezes. He'll say yes, but it's all very uncomfortable, like he can't decide if he feels like it or not."  
  
"Wow," Charlie said quietly.  
  
That was a horrible sign. If he even had Charlie almost speechless, the guy who could ramble literally through four periods without stopping (and had once) about a one-hour season finale of a reality show, then that meant there was nothing to say except the inevitable:  
  
Kurt didn't want to date him. Kurt liked making out with him, maybe, Kurt enjoyed hanging out with him, but Kurt wasn't actually that into him.  
  
Kurt practically hopped up the two stairs into the kitchen and snagged a bottle of water from the cooler. "Hey," he smiled, but it fell as he saw the kind of resigned, sad look on Blaine's face. "What's wrong?"  
  
"Nothing." The mask was back on - confident, smiling, happy, and absolutely fake. "Having fun?"  
  
"We may end up on a double-date with Ethan and Mercedes in the next couple weeks. And if you don't get over there soon, I'm physically dragging you over for a duet," he stated with a little two-fingered gesture, pointing from his eyes to Blaine's, as he headed back into the living room.  
  
It all sounded halfway between what he would have said two months ago and what he would say if they were dating, but not quite in either category. Duets went well for them but weren't always romantic. Double-date sounded promising, but Blaine knew it would be entirely to act as a buffer for Ethan and Mercedes in case they ended up hating each other. Most likely it would turn into all four of them gabbing about magazines - all very friendsish. And a gesture instead of a kiss.  
  
He had no idea what that meant. Judging by the look on his friend's face, neither did Charlie.  
  
* * * * *  
When Kurt woke up on Friday morning, after taking a moment to bask in the fact that he had been able to sleep in until almost 10 thanks to the teacher in-service day, he rolled over and plucked his phone from the nightstand. There were two messages:  
  
 _Charlie: I dont know what the deal is w you and Blaine, but you 2 srsly need to talk. Then you srsly need to meet me at Polaris because you would not believe the sale the LV@Saks is having._  
  
For once, the shopping portion of the message didn't catch his attention first. Blaine must have said something - they weren't awkward at the party, even if they hadn't spent very much time hanging out together. To be fair, it was the first time either of them were seeing their friends in close to a month, and Blaine in particular missed them quite a bit so Kurt didn't want to intrude. They got to hang out all the time; Blaine only got to see Wes these days on Skype. But if Charlie thought there was something wrong, and the guy was not especially observant, then that meant either it was blatantly obvious or Blaine had said something.  
  
The second message wasn't any better.  
  
 _Quinn: I've been trying to hold off saying anything all week  
but you and Puck need to talk before things go even further down hill_  
  
That issue he knew existed. He was all too painfully aware of the problems there, and that Puck would never be the one to initiate the conversation.  
  
He pulled up a blank text message and sent it to Puck:  _We need to talk._  
  
He knew it would go over like a lead balloon, but it was necessary. Puck had been halfway-avoiding him all week, was generally sullen when they were together, and seemed to alternate between angry and sad. If Puck wasn't going to talk, which he assumed he wasn't, at least he could try and pry answers out of him. He wondered idly if he could use sex to his advantage - start just enough and then refuse to go further until Puck answered simple questions.  
  
That was probably cruel and manipulative, he thought, nodding, but it might end up being his last resort if Puck continued to just skulk around school and not speak to him. Maybe he could do the slightly less cruel version - positive reinforcement. Answer a question, get a blowjob; that should work, right? Everyone won.  
  
He doubted it would accomplish much, but he had to try. If he could Puck over whatever block this was, they'd be fine - but first he had to know which of the four things could be bothering Puck were the actual culprit.  
  
While waiting for the usual sullen "wutevs" in response, he sent the same text to Blaine, then pulled out his computer to check his usual morning sites. The text from Blaine in response came about five minutes later.  
  
 _Yes, we do. Now?_  
  
Kurt blinked. He'd planned on addressing whatever Puck's issues were first since they seemed to be the worst - or at least the ones sending the biggest, darkest, most ominous clouds over the house right about now - but Blaine actually wanted to talk. He  _wanted_  to talk about whatever it was that had been bothering him enough to mention it to Charlie. He wanted to talk about what was making him awkward.  
  
In a way it didn't seem quite fair, but as he checked facebook and saw that Puck was indeed awake - a status from five minutes ago, posted from his phone, mentioned something about toaster waffles... "Screw it," he stated, shaking his head as he typed a response to Blaine.  _Sure. Come over here._  
  
Puck saw his text and blew it off - the same way he'd been blowing off Kurt's attempts at fixing whatever was wrong all week. Puck could wait.


	9. Chapter 9

When Blaine arrived, he seemed to have a kind of nervous, determined energy about him. Like he wasn't entirely sure he wanted to have this conversation, but he knew it was necessary so he was going to be a grown-up and do it.  
  
Or maybe that was just Kurt's perception as he was still feeling bitter.  
  
He led Blaine to his room and perched on the edge of the couch. As much as he knew they needed to talk about these issues - he and Blaine as well as he and Puck...it occurred to him that he didn't actually know how things like this were supposed to go. For that matter, he wasn't entirely sure he could put words to the immense feeling of frustration he was feeling. Let alone with Blaine, where he had no idea what the problem was - how was this 'talking' thing supposed to work, anyway?   
  
He had never been someone who actually got around to talking much, at least not about anything that mattered. The urge was there, and it blossomed when the problem actually involved another person and was something that could theoretically be fixed (unlike being a punching bag at McKinley or being depressed at having to go back), but that didn't always translate into the ability to speak constructively.  
  
He wouldn't know; he didn't really have any experience. All he knew was that Puck was even worse about it than he was. But Blaine...Blaine seemed like he might know what he was doing.  
  
"So," Blaine began. He stood in the center of the room, hands in his pockets, shifting slightly from one foot to the other.  
  
"Yes," Kurt replied awkwardly.  
  
There was a long pause and Blaine grinned, shaking his head. "Okay, you're no better at this than I am," he stated, seeming almost relieved.  
  
"Not at all," Kurt stated, but he could smile a little. The tension wasn't broken, but it was cracked; that was enough. "Why have you been so awkward and distant since last weekend?"  
  
The question was direct and Blaine's smile faded. He wondered if he'd been too forward about it. Maybe this talking thing was meant to be eased into. "I felt kind of...strange about last weekend," Blaine explained slowly, hesitantly, like he was searching for the most precise words. "Conflicted."  
  
"Because of the friends-or-more question?" Kurt asked.  
  
"Sort of. That wasn't the biggest for me - why? Is that what had you seeming standoffish?"  
  
"I wasn't-... I thought  _you_  were. I thought that's why you were distant, so I got worried." He was rambling, and the feeling of ineloquence was driving him crazy. But they were talking and that meant progress, right? So he'd been led to believe, at least. "At the singalong, then again at dinner, and the next day, it all felt the same way it had - like we were best friends. I like that. I love hanging out with you, it feels like...well, like the best friend I've wanted since I was a kid but was always too 'different' to find in Lima. But at the same time, there are things I want to do with you that aren't exactly part of a traditional 'friendship', and that's when you started acting strange. I thought that meant you-"   
  
"Thought we should just be friends?" Blaine asked with a kind of fond, familiar smile. "Sort of. I don't know. Because believe me - I would love to be so much more than that, but then you..." He paused. He wasn't really going to ask this, was he? No - it reeked of desperation and pathetic insecurity. Kurt saw more of him than about anyone else, but this was a little too much, even for him. "What you said a minute ago, about there being things you want to do that aren't so 'friendly', did you...mean that?" He rolled his eyes at how pathetic even he knew he sounded.  
  
"Of course," Kurt replied slowly, eyes narrowing. "Why wouldn't I?"  
  
"No reason." Blaine's response was just a little too quick, a touch on the enthusiastic side, and that didn't help his case for the sincerity of the statement.   
  
"You're as bad as he is," Kurt mumbled with a roll of his eyes, and Blaine looked stricken. "I didn't mean to say it like that. I meant that...if we're going to try this talking thing, I'm fairly certain you're not meant to stop midway through."  
  
Blaine regarded him carefully, as though trying to determine whether Kurt really meant that and wasn't going to pull the same shut-down routine himself in a few minutes. He doubted it, but he couldn't guarantee anything and that concerned him. As much as he was used to being kind of over-the-top and laying a lot on the line, there was still an element of severe embarrassment at play. If he was wrong, he would be mortified; if he was right, he would need to find somewhere else to move to because he could never show his face again. "The other night, when we...were you thinking about Puck?"   
  
Kurt's eyes widened in horror. Oh god. Blaine knew he'd been feeling guilty and overanalyzing and comparing. He  _knewthem_? He had to fix that somehow.  
  
"What?" Blaine asked. When Kurt didn't answer right away, he added, "Okay, if I can't go silent, you can't either."  
  
"Come here," Kurt urged, and as Blaine reluctantly moved to join him on the couch, Kurt tugged on his wrist gently to direct him towards his lap.  
  
Blaine laughed softly and rolled his eyes. "I'm not that much smaller than you, silly."  
  
"I don't care." Blaine carefully knelt with his legs on either side of Kurt's, not actually putting much weight on Kurt's thighs. "You have no idea how much I enjoyed Saturday. Believe me - you did things to me I didn't even know were  _possible_ , and I've seen more internet porn than I should probably admit to." Blaine grinned and kind of rolled his eyes fondly, which Kurt took as a victory. He leaned up to kiss Blaine gently and added quietly, "Things I would never complain about repeating."  
  
The shy, happy grin from the other night was back - exactly what Kurt had been hoping for. "Yeah?" Blaine's tone was flirty, suggestive...and hot as hell.   
  
"Yeah," Kurt replied with a grin not all that different from Blaine's, but with a little more nervousness. He hadn't realized how careful he had to be with all of this - it was so easy to forget that just because it felt like he and Blaine had been together forever didn't mean they actually had. They were still learning to read each other, and as outwardly confident as the guy seemed, he was starting to get the impression that it was like 80% bravado and 20% actual confidence. Sometimes less.  
  
Not that he was much different, acting like he knew how to take charge. He had no idea. But it was important - he needed to show Blaine he wasn't just reacting (or, worse yet, fake-reacting) to what he was doing, that he enjoyed it enough to seek it out. Unfortunately for both of them, he'd never really taken the lead role when it came to anything sexual. Once, maybe, if he was being charitable, but that had been the same day he'd been depressed and vaguely sociopathic enough to take on Azimio in a fight, so he wasn't exactly looking to that particular incident as an indicator of how he should act. Besides, even that had been far more like 'Shut up and kiss me so we don't have to talk" than "Let me seduce you."  
  
God. Anything involving him and seducing someone was almost enough to make him laugh out loud.  
  
Maybe there were some things that were easier with Puck.  
  
Banishing that thought - and all other uses of that name - from his head, he drew in a deep breath. He could do this - he  _wanted_  to do this. Unfortunately, he was concerned, his nervousness could easily be translated into Blaine thinking once again that he didn't actually want to do any of this at all. Sexual politics got a lot more complicated with versatility, didn't they?  
  
Placing one hand on the small of Blaine's back and the other on his upper arm, he leaned up to kiss him a little harder this time, more insistently. Blaine moaned softly against his lips, which Kurt took as a sign he wasn't being a completely unattractive spaz, and shifted a little closer. He wasn't sure how Blaine almost seemed less hesitant and shy and like a puppy who expected to get kicked when he wasn't the one starting the kisses, but in a way it almost made sense, Kurt concluded; after all, if he felt like an idiot who would get laughed off the couch when he was trying to be the one in control, Blaine might feel the same way. Not everyone was the natural take-charge king of the makeout type.  
  
He lifted his hips experimentally, rocking slightly and groaning as the slight bulge in his jeans rubbed against the slight bulge in Blaine's; exactly what he was going for. Perfect. He could do this - he had the basic knowledge, it was just a matter of feeling confident enough to put it into action.   
  
He had the sudden mental image of a text message coming to his phone reading "Confidence" and it took everything in him not to start laughing.  
  
"Are you okay?" Blaine asked as Kurt pulled back from the kiss to avoid sputtering.  
  
"Sorry," Kurt muttered, blushing, as he tried desperately to stop the laughter. "Funny mental image. Nothing."  
  
"You sure?" Blaine was smiling more than Kurt would have expected, a kind of concern mixed with fondness, like he found Kurt laughing during making out...cute? What the hell was that?   
  
"Yes. Just a little...awkward," he offered in the spirit of openness and honesty. The look seemed to say it was okay - that not knowing precisely what he was doing wasn't some kind of horrible thing, but was almost an equalizer. Like he could relax a little bit and not worry so much about being perfect at this; it was an unusual concept for him, but he could get used to it - maybe. He could try, at any rate.  
  
Blaine rocked forward with a low, "I'm not complaining," and a sly smirk. Kurt grinned and leaned up to resume the kissing.  
  
"Unfreakingbelievable."  
  
The sound of Puck's voice from the bottom of the stairs made them both jump, and Blaine turned so quickly that Kurt half expected him to throw out his back out. "What are you doing here?" Kurt demanded.  
  
"You said we needed to 'talk'," he replied with accusation practically dripping from the last word.   
  
"I'm just gonna go," Blaine said, slipping off Kurt's lap.  
  
"No - you stay. I'm gone," Puck stated shortly, heading up the stairs.  
  
Kurt jumped of the couch to race after him. "What is your problem?"  
  
"My  _problem_? Is that you make a big deal about me not showing up to talk and then I get here and you're macking on him. What the fuck do you think my problem is?"  
  
"How do you want the list?" Kurt replied sarcastically. Puck's eyes flashed angrily, narrowing, but Kurt continued. "You don't get to be mad at me for this. I've walked in on you doing a  _lot_  worse - my clothes are still on, thank you, and there's only one other person in the room."  
  
"So it's a spite thing?"  
  
"Do you honestly think I'm that petty?"  
  
"I don't know, all you can talk about is the one freaking time I had a threesome and that's when you two started making out all the time."  
  
Kurt shook his head and rolled his eyes - unreal. "Of all the self-centered things you've ever said, Puck, and there are a myriad, that may just be the most ridiculous," he stated, jaw tight. "While your extracurriculars reminded me exactly where I stood in your mind, I was not dating Blaine to try to make you jealous. How much of a manipulative jerk do you think I am?"  
  
"Well it's working!"  
  
Kurt stared at him, trying to figure out what Puck meant was working. "Excuse me?"  
  
"It's working, okay? I'm jealous."  
  
The admission was surprising enough on its own, but doubly-so coming from Puck. "Really," Kurt said dryly, studying him with a raised eyebrow.  
  
"Yeah," Puck replied shortly; if it were possible to toss the words from his lips, he would have. He didn't get why Kurt was staring at him like that, like it was some big secret - the guy wasn't that big of an idiot. He'd known it already, he didn't know why Kurt even made him say it, but there - he'd said it. That was supposed to fix things now, right?  
  
Kurt nodded slowly, then replied simply "Okay."  
  
"Okay?" Puck repeated, confused as hell.  
  
"Yes." He placed his hands on his hips. "Anything you want to do about that?"  
  
He was daring him now, Puck knew. He was practically fucking  _daring_  him to say "Stop dating Blaine" so Kurt could throw back some line about not trusting him to stop seeing Santana on the side. Or so Kurt could call him a selfish jerk and break up with him. Or all of the above, really.   
  
No way in hell was he saying it. The second he said it, Kurt was going to pull out big words and his ice queen tone to essentially say "Too bad, Puck, sucks to be you, lemme go make out with this guy who looks like a Fraggle because he's gay enough for me."  
  
No way. He wasn't walking into that trap.  
  
Even if he did want to go toss every member of the AV club into the dumpster after seeing Kurt with the guy straddling his lap like that.  
  
Was it a power thing? he wondered. Did Kurt want to be, y'know, the other half of the relationship? The- Crap. He knew they had some kind of baseball metaphor that he totally blocked out or he wouldn't be able to play in a few months without chuckling. But the guy part. Was that part of it? Because Blaine was on Kurt's lap when they were making out, even though they were close to the same size, and Kurt always ended up on  _his_  lap, which was usually just because he was smaller. Maybe Blaine did the girl part and Kurt wanted to change it up a little. He didn't think he could do that, but maybe...y'know, if it was jamming something up his ass or Kurt dumping his ass, he could probably deal with the first one.  
  
He didn't think that was it, though. For one thing, the only thing he and Kurt had never really had problems with was the sex. It was everything else that was the problem; maybe it was the making everything about sex that was the problem. That sounded more likely.  
  
If what Quinn said about Kurt being in love with the guy was right, then that was...  
  
It wasn't like he thought Kurt loved only Blaine - Kurt loved him too, they got it. They didn't need to go around saying it every five seconds to know it. But if he loved both of them, and one guy was giving him everything he wanted and the other wasn't?  
  
Why the fuck did Quinn think this talking shit was a good idea?  
  
"You want to change anything?" Kurt asked again, looking at him expectantly with raised eyebrows and a kind of "Well? What are you waiting for?" expression.  
  
Monogamy never worked out for him, especially not when the person was already borderline sick of him when it started.   
  
"Puck. Do you want to talk about changing the arrangement, or are you happy the way things are?" Kurt sounded more exasperated every time he prompted. It didn't escape Puck's notice that Kurt didn't even say 'Do you want to change the arrangement' - he wasn't offering a guarantee. He was offering the chance to  _talk_  about something that may or may not ever happen. At least the status quo was something dependable, even if it sucked.  
  
Some Kurt was better than none.  
  
"Yeah," he replied sarcastically. "Totally happy. I especially like getting to think about what you're doing with Frodo over there when I'm not around. It's the best thing ever." He turned and strode out to his car.  
  
Some Kurt was better than none. He just didn't want to think about where the rest of Kurt was.  
  
* * * * *  
  
He had no idea what to do.  
  
It was obvious that this arrangement wasn't working out. Blaine was insecure, Puck was insecure, both of them got increasingly insecure about what the other one could offer that they couldn't, and it was bringing out the ugly side of both gorgeous guys.  
  
He needed to come up with some way to fix this.  
  
After all, as much as it was Puck's mess for creating the rules of the relationship, it was mostly his for creating this particular configuration. And now he couldn't extricate himself from the situation without at least two of them getting hurt.  
  
If he closed the relationship, Blaine would get hurt. If he didn't, Puck would get hurt.  
  
And he was going to be hurt regardless.  
  
The most frustrating part, he realized as he laid on his bed and stared at the ceiling, was that everything he tried to do to make things better with one boyfriend, made them worse with the other. When he tried to make Blaine feel less insecure, to let him know that he did love him and did want to be with him, Puck felt like he was being shoved aside. When he tried to get Puck to talk - admittedly not his finest hour, but waiting it out and being patient wasn't freaking working - Blaine felt abandoned and like he was coming between a previously-happy couple, which did nothing to help anyone's mood.  
  
There was no way this could work.  
  
But if it wasn't going to work, then what was he going to do? Choose one? His stomach sank at even the thought of choosing, let alone when he started to try to come up with which one of the boys he loved he should keep around. How the hell was he supposed to pick between them? To-...to weigh them out like some kind of purchase he wasn't sure he wanted? He couldn't even choose between two sweaters during a menswear sale, now he was supposed to choose between -  
  
He couldn't. He  _couldn't_.  
  
So he had to come up with some alternative. Some other way to hold this tiny threesome together with both hands and as much rope as he could find, because there was no way -  _no way_  - he could pick between them. He had to figure out something as a last-ditch effort to keep them.  
  
The idea that occurred to him was crazy. It was completely, unequivocally insane. But it was all he could come up with.  
  
It would be all about the presentation, he concluded. Presenting the idea in such a way that they wanted to say 'yes' instead of 'no', because he knew they wouldn't want to agree to it. It was a horrible idea and he knew it, of course they would want to say no.  
  
So he just needed to be sure he sold it with enough fake enthusiasm that they would want to agree, instead of both of them calling him insane and walking out.  
  
* * * * *  
  
"Well," Kurt said in his brightest, most confident voice, hands clasped in front of his waist as he stood in front of the couch, looking down at Blaine and Puck. The pair seemed to be eyeing each other suspiciously, and their glances towards Kurt weren't much more trusting. "I assume you're wondering why I gathered you here today."  
  
"Presumably not to join us in holy matrimony," Blaine replied dryly.  
  
Kurt repressed a laugh, but not the faint smirk that went with it. "No. Even if more than 2/3 of Ohio voters hadn't voted to prohibit it. No - I wanted to talk to the two of you about...our future."  
  
Puck raised his eyebrow, half surprised that Kurt didn't have blinking lights or at least a completely ridiculous hand gesture when he said that. The guy was just wearing the fake bright smile he usually wore before trying to get the guys in New Directions to wear peacock feathers on their heads or something, which meant he was gonna be pitching some crazy-ass fucking idea that nobody, including him, was going to go for. As if any conversation involving the words 'our future' wasn't automatically doomed to suckage just by existing.  
  
"Obviously our situation is more complicated than your average teenage relationship melodrama; most individuals dating two people are lying to at least one of them, usually one's on their way out and another on their way in. That's not what any of this is. I love both of you - honestly and without reservation. It's not a matter of auditioning each of you until I choose one - I don't have any intention of choosing one. I couldn't. I won't. I can't just cut one of you out of my life...but unfortunately things can't be as simple as they would be in my ideal world, so it's starting to feel as though it might come down to that. So I'm making a preemptive strike.  
  
"Now, as you know, I've been attempting to solve the problems caused by simultaneously dating each of you, but the issues seem at this point insurmountable. Whenever I spend time with Blaine, Puck gets jealous and vice versa. At first I thought making a chart, clear divisions of equal time for each of you, would be enough to help ease the feelings that the other one is getting more of my time and attention, but I'm beginning to think that's not going to be a realistic longterm solution. So here is what I would propose." He drew in a deep breath and paused for dramatic emphasis. "Three-way dating."  
  
"A threesome?" Puck asked skeptically.   
  
"No - three-way dating," Kurt clarified, which didn't actually clarify anything at all.   
  
"So more like a closed-triad instead of a V?" Blaine asked.  
  
"Huh?"  
  
"The three of us together instead of me with one or the other," Kurt translated for Puck who was still looking at him like he was crazy. "Obviously there are still some issues to work out. Puck, for example, your heterosexual proclivities would appear to make this entire arrangement unworkable. However, I have no intention of forcing you to do anything you're uncomfortable with - this isn't some grand plot to get the two of you making out." He chuckled at the comment, then stopped as he saw the horrified looks from both boys. "Anyway, you're still free to do whatever you want with women on the side - I wouldn't presume to dictate whom, though I assume Santana will be involved, as usual. This isn't some kind of back-door way to close the relationship so that I get what I want and you don't."   
  
Puck wasn't sure how Kurt thought that, since what he wanted was for Blaine to get the fuck out already and somehow Kurt thought that meant Blaine intruding on every ounce of time they were supposed to have to themselves - as if the guy didn't butt in enough already. It was obvious that Kurt's assessment was sincere in his own mind; he wasn't trying to sell them on something he thought was bullshit. Or at least he'd convinced himself it might not be bullshit. But that didn't stop the idea from being complete and total crap.  
  
"And, of course, protection at all times," Kurt added onto the end of something else he'd been saying, but Blaine hadn't been paying enough attention. How had he ended up in this situation? How was it that the boy he was maybe completely in love with was talking him into some kind of permanent threesome with a guy he didn't particularly like? Sure, Puck was attractive enough from an objective viewing, but he wasn't at all Blaine's type and was kind of a self-centered jackass. No, strike that - he was entirely a self-centered jackass. He was a bully who gave himself credit for learning not to throw his boyfriend into a dumpster, and now they were supposed to all be sleeping together?  _Dating_?  
  
How had he fallen in love with someone so clueless, and why - why, oh freaking  _why_  - was he finding it charming?  
  
"So," Kurt concluded brightly, hands clasped in front of his chest now, still wearing that grin that Puck was starting to seriously revert back to hating in a way that made him want to beat himself in the head until he passed out so he could stop staring at it. "Any questions?"  
  
"Yeah, I have one." He raised his hand. "Have you lost your freaking mind, dude? You want me to start dating a second guy I don't even like? No offense, man," he added in Blaine's general direction, "but you're kinda a loser and way too obsessed with those magazines and stuff. Plus you're a guy and I'm not gay."  
  
"None taken," Blaine replied. "I have to agree with him - Kurt, this isn't going to work any better than the status quo. You're asking two people who get along as roommates most of the time, if not forced to spend too much time talking, to be in a relationship with each other when their only link is that they're also dating the same guy?"  
  
Kurt's smile faded and he tried to cover it by tightening his jaw; instead it just made him look more irritated more quickly, tempered only by the kind of sad frustration in his eyes. "Please let me at least try it," he requested. "Otherwise we have to stay where we are - where you're both miserable - or I'm going to have to choose one of you and I'll be miserable. Can't we please just try to meet in the middle and see if we can make it work?"  
  
"Why? So everyone can lose?" Puck stated bluntly.  
  
"Please don't make me pick," Kurt said softly. It was the quietest thing he'd said since they'd sat down, by far the most subdued, but it was the thing that shut both of them up the fastest.  
  
Neither of them believed that, if forced to pick, Kurt would pick him.  
  
After all, Blaine reasoned, Puck was Kurt's first love - his first kiss, his first everything in any possible sense of the word. That was a big deal to people. He was the star of the football team and the stud every guy in school wanted to be and every girl in school - make that every girl in  _town_  - wanted to get with. He was muscular and hung and had this way of making Kurt almost come just by walking into the room. They could read each other's facial expressions without saying a word - he'd once watched them have an entire conversation with only their eyebrows. There was a connection, a history, and as much as he didn't understand what in the world it was Kurt saw in Puck, it was obvious he saw something.   
  
But on the other hand, Puck knew, Blaine had everything important in common with Kurt and all they freaking did was talk about it. Talking about the fashion magazines. Talking about movie stars for something other than who they'd want to bang if they met them. Talking about Gaga and Madonna and all the other chicks that Puckzilla couldn't stand. He was the kind of guy parents actually wanted their kids to date, all clean-cut and polite and shit. And more importantly...he wasn't Puck.  
  
That was the number one criteria, actually, Puck concluded. Anyone picking between Puck and Somebody Else when they were deciding who to go out with, picked Somebody Else. Every freaking time. Why would Kurt be any different? Especially since, of everyone in town, Kurt had bigger dreams than this place. He was going places, he was going to do big things in the city with other really gay guys. Kurt was special and no way was he going to stay with the dude voted Most Likely to Remain a Lima Loser, even if Puck knew he was getting out of there eventually.  
  
So if they made Kurt pick, if either of them put their foot down and said no...  
  
"I can't," he added. "I can't lose either one of you. So rather than dating each of you and attempting to balance the complicated schedules and needs to ensure that you're getting equal time - recreationally, at school, and sexually - I'm hoping that dating both of you together can make things...simpler. Hold everything together so that we can find a nice happy equilibrium."  
  
He sounded so earnest that Blaine  _wanted_  to believe him. He wanted to believe that this could work out, they could all be happy. It just all sounded ridiculous - they could barely stand each other now, Kurt thought they would get along better when actively competing for his affection? He thought that just because they were in the same room it wouldn't still mean competing for his time?  
  
But if he said no and Puck said yes, that meant Puck would win. If he said no and Puck said yes, that meant he couldn't have Kurt at  _all_ , and that...the thought of that almost made the threeway look like a viable dating option. Almost. Maybe. If he squinted really hard.  
  
"Okay," Blaine said slowly.   
  
"Okay?" Kurt repeated, eyes wide.  
  
"Yeah," he replied.   
  
There was uncertainty in his voice, but it was a yes instead of a no; that was all Kurt needed. If he could just have a chance to show them, to let them understand why this would be the best option...if they would just let him in the door, he could win them over. He knew it.  
  
The moment Blaine said 'okay' was the moment Puck's options were over. If Blaine said okay and he said no, he really fucking doubted Kurt's response was going to be 'Sorry, Blaine, I'm just with Puck then.' He couldn't very well give his own counteroffer, either: 'How about instead of you having two boyfriends at once, you're stuck with me, even though you'll never trust that I'm not sleeping with Santana too?'   
  
He wasn't sure why Kurt always assumed he was screwing on the side. Sure, he had the option, but it wasn't like he did it all the time. There were entire times he didn't do it at all, and not when Santana was even on strike or anything. He could've slept with Shelby the other day but didn't - okay, that was mostly because he'd made out with her daughter, but that wasn't the point. He could've slept with Santana or Brittany when he went to Blaine's for the night. He could've returned Mrs. Flannigan's call when she claimed to have questions about winterizing her hottub but he knew that wasn't why she wanted him to go over there. He could've done a lot of things but he didn't because he didn't actually  _want_  to, but Kurt never freaking asked him that part. Just assumed all the time, then acted like he was trying to do Puckerone some kind of favours by 'letting him' have girls on the side because it meant Kurt got to keep his second boyfriend.  
  
It pissed him off. Just not enough to want Kurt to fuck off or stop coming over or anything.  
  
So when Blaine agreed to the fucking stupid arrangement - that he wondered how Kurt had come up with it because Kurt was  _not_  a dumb guy - what choice did he have? The dye was cast then, dude, there was nothing he could say except 'yes.'  
  
He picked the most dignified, ambivalent form of it he could. "Fine, dude, whatever," he said in his best 'Like I give that much of a shit - who would be threatened by this little freak' voice that definitely didn't sound like he was pouting or whining or anything.   
  
"Really?" Kurt looked so fucking happy that it kind of made him nauseous. Not because he was the kind of guy who didn't like showing happiness or anything, more like...he couldn't remember the last time Kurt looked like that for just him. It seriously took a second guy to make him happy like this? Way to kill his ego.  
  
The only saving grace was that Blaine looked as unenthusiastic about it as he felt. Like he was only doing it because he was afraid of losing Kurt, too. But was that seriously enough to build some kind of non-relationship on? Super Mario Brothers 3 and not wanting to break up with the same boyfriend didn't seem like enough to date over, but what the hell would he know about it anyway?  
  
Kurt was already chattering away excitedly about potential outings and date nights, but Blaine and Puck exchanged a look; this could only end badly. But neither one of them was going to be the first one to say it.

**Author's Note:**

> I wish I could take credit for the recognition of just how many songs use the I V iv iii IV I IV V progression, but I have to give credit (and links) instead to Pachelbel Rant by Rob Paravonian.


End file.
